At the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2025, I spoke with CISOs, OT administrators, and cybersecurity architects working to secure industrial environments. While the big themes of AI, zero trust, and IT risk dominated the sessions, the hallway conversations pointed to a more pressing shift: 

“We know what’s in our OT environment. Now how do we act on it?” 

This shift—from discovery to action—and how secure remote access is redefining the digital transformation journey in OT, was eye-opening. Here’s what I took away from those conversations and how Dispel is helping teams make the leap. 

1. "Every site has its own remote access setup. Can we standardize it?"

At the Summit, I spoke with an OT administrator from a major food manufacturer. He described the challenge of managing remote access across multiple sites—juggling browsers, jump boxes, legacy VPNs, and contractor-specific tools. "Every site has its own nonstandard setup," he told me. "Standardizing would be a game changer." 

It’s a familiar story—and one that’s exactly why our Tiered Connection Suite announcement resonated so strongly. For OT teams struggling with fragmented access tools, the concept of centralizing connections clicked immediately.  

Dispel’s Tiered Connection Suite brings it all together—clientless browser sessions, full-featured virtual desktops, and local application access—within a single, secure platform built for OT environments. 

Key takeaway: Flexibility for OT teams cannot be overstated—they need one unified platform that supports all their tools and use cases. 
 

2. “Vendor A needs a jump box. But what happens when there are 100?”

One of the most urgent conversations I had was with a security manager overseeing dozens of manufacturing sites. “Our jump host maintenance is out of control,” she told me. “They’re always out of date. It becomes a balancing act between keeping up and looking the other way on security.” 

We talked through the reality: 

• It starts easy—spin up a virtual machine for Vendor A 

• But a month later, it’s already outdated 

• Then Vendor A becomes Vendor A1 through A10 as staff expands 

• Now multiply that across 100 sites 

Suddenly, you’re managing and patching thousands of jump hosts—each with different users, permissions, and compliance requirements. 

And that’s just scratching the surface. These jump hosts aren’t just high-maintenance—they’re operationally expensive. With recent licensing changes from VMware and Citrix, teams are paying more for increasingly poor performance. Worse still, these static systems can’t scale elastically, forcing organizations to over-provision for Black Swan access events. 

The true cost of jump hosts includes: 

• Constant patching and lifecycle management across hundreds of VMs 

• Licensing costs that balloon with vendor growth 

• Layered PAM tools just to manage identities per host 

• Over-provisioned infrastructure to account for peak vendor surges 

Dispel eliminates these burdens by: 

• Providing cloud-native access that scales up or down dynamically 

• Removing the cost and complexity of jump boxes and PAM integrations 

• Offering session isolation, MFA, and fine-grained access controls out of the box 

Key takeaway: Jump hosts were built for a different era of IT-centric thinking but are still frequently used in OT to provide intermediate security. There is a better way. 

3. "When our OT lead retired, we lost 10 years of knowledge."

At dinner one night, a utility CISO shared a sobering story. Their most experienced OT lead retired, and with him went over a decade of undocumented know-how. The replacement team had no playbooks to follow, just a steep learning curve. 

That’s when session recording came up. More than a compliance checkbox, session recording is a training tool, capturing institutional knowledge in real time. 

Dispel delivers value by: 

• Recording every remote session for auditing and training 

• Helping organizations build internal playbooks 

• Preserving expertise across vendor and employee turnover 

Key takeaway: Session recording is about more than security. It’s about continuity. 

4. “We have the data—we just can’t use it”

A controls engineer from a global OEM summed it up perfectly: “We have the data. But it’s delayed, siloed, or insecure. It’s just not bringing the value we had hoped.” 

That sentiment echoed across the Summit. The roadblock wasn’t AI—it was data readiness. Real-time insights, predictive maintenance, and condition monitoring all depend on continuous, trusted access to operational data. But legacy systems weren’t built to share that data easily, let alone securely. 

The algorithms are ready. The problem is the infrastructure. 

Dispel helps bridge that gap by enabling: 

• Real-time data streaming of operational data from both legacy and modern systems 

• Unified data flows that support AI, predictive maintenance (PdM), patching, and compliance 

• Format-agnostic compatibility aligned with IEC 62443, NIST 800-82, NIS2, and more 

With continuous, secure data flow in place, industrial organizations can: 

• Standardize operations across multi-site or merged facilities 

• Accelerate PdM, AI, and condition-based monitoring at scale 

• Improve response times and reduce unplanned downtime 

• Build secure data lakes for AI training and long-term insight 

Key takeaway: AI in OT doesn’t fail because of the models. It fails because of fragmented, insecure data. Dispel’s industrial data streaming makes your data usable—where, when, and how you need it. 

5. "OT is a blind spot—and we don’t really know what good looks like."

At a roundtable dinner, a CISO from a major energy provider voiced a concern we hear often: “OT is a blind spot. I can’t replace the systems—and even if I could, they’d be legacy again in two years. How am I supposed to secure something that wasn’t designed for connectivity?” 

That question stuck with me. It’s not about modernizing every piece of equipment. It’s about building a secure environment around them. 

That’s when I shared what I call the “submarine model.” Just like in the ocean depths, operators aren’t meant to withstand the full pressure of cybersecurity threats on their own. So, you don’t harden the operator—you build the submarine around them. A secure, dynamic environment that adapts to threats and protects them while they do their job. 

Dispel enables this with: 

• Moving Target Defense SD-WAN, eliminates static pathways, reducing your attack surface. 

• Layered protections including encryption, session isolation, segmented pathways, integrated threat monitoring, and audit logging 

• A secure access shell that updates and patches itself—not the operator 

Key takeaway: You don’t need to overhaul every legacy system to achieve Zero Trust in OT. With the right platform, you protect your people and assets without disruption—secure by design, efficient by necessity. 
 

Redefining How You Connect to OT — Industrial's Next Phase in Cybersecurity

I’ll close with a conversation I had with an analyst, where we agreed: 2025 is a turning point for OT cybersecurity—the end of knowing, and the beginning of doing. 

Most industrial organizations have now deployed—or are actively evaluating—solutions like Nozomi Networks, Dragos, Armis, and Claroty. These are critical for asset discovery, vulnerability management, and threat detection. They’ve implemented segmentation, endpoint protection, and monitoring. 

But the next step is clear: It’s time to act on that visibility.  

Dispel represents the execution layer of industrial digital transformation—providing the secure access, control, and responsiveness needed to operationalize cybersecurity and unlock operational efficiency. 

Here’s where we fit in: 

• We integrate with “knowing tools,” the asset visibility and threat detection ecosystem, to enable action. 

• We deliver the “doing” layer—Zero Trust Remote Access and real-time data streaming that empowers OT teams. 

• We help organizations unlock the full value of their OT data and accelerate safe, efficient remote operations. 

Key takeaway: OT cybersecurity is evolving. The next phase of digital transformation is about redefining how you connect to OT.