The Downtime Problem: Why OT Efficiency Friction Is Costing Industrial Programs $170K an Hour 

Every minute spent getting OT secure remote access working is a minute not spent on production. Here's what efficiency friction actually costs — and how the best OT security programs eliminate it. 

I want to tell you about a conversation I had with a maintenance engineer at a large manufacturing facility. She was responsible for managing third-party vendor access to about forty different assets across three sites. She had a security solution. She had an access management process. On paper, the program worked. 

In practice, she spent about forty-five minutes of every access event just getting the connection established — troubleshooting the security platform, chasing down the vendor, confirming whether the pathway was healthy before she could hand it off. She described it this way: The security solution is my second job. My first job is production. 

That framing — security as a second job that competes with the first — is the definition of efficiency friction in OT. And it has a price tag that most operations teams haven't fully calculated. 

The Math That Changes How You See Every Friction Point 

$169,889 — average cost of one hour of unplanned industrial downtime — ABB, Modernization for Resilience, 2025 

~$2,000 — cost per minute of downtime in industrial environments 

These numbers should change how you think about every friction point in your OT remote access and maintenance workflows. A vendor who can't connect for thirty minutes isn't just inconvenient — that's $60,000 in potential exposure. A tool that adds ten minutes of setup to every access event, across fifty events a month, is generating over $1 million in compounded downtime risk annually. 

Most industrial programs know their downtime costs. What they haven't connected is how directly their OT remote access solutions drive them. 

See how teams are reducing downtime and standardizing access. Read Takepoint's Reducing Operational Friction Whitepaper → 

Where Efficiency Friction Lives in OT Operations 

1. Slow OT Remote Access Connections: The Setup Tax 

The most common feedback we hear from OT operators: By the time the vendor is actually connected and working, half the maintenance window is gone.  

Legacy remote access tools weren't built for the range of systems and protocols in a real industrial environment. Clientless access that only handles standard protocols leaves engineers stranded on legacy systems. Local application access that requires extensive configuration adds overhead before any work gets done. 

The Dispel Zero Trust Engine provides three role-based connection methods designed for real industrial workflows: 

• clientless browser access for rapid connectivity when speed matters 

• secure disposable virtual desktops for high-risk or high-value sessions 

• native local application access for legacy and proprietary systems 

Teams select the method that matches the job. No universal compromise that serves no one well. 

2. Vendor Remote Access Approval: The Bottleneck Problem 

In most OT environments, access window approval flows through a central security or IT team. This makes sense from a control perspective. But, it creates a serious bottleneck in practice. A vendor calling in for an urgent maintenance issue at a remote site has to wait for someone in a different time zone to approve their access. 

The Dispel Zero Trust Engine allows site-level administrator delegation — the right people at the right sites own their own access approval workflows without losing central visibility or audit logging. Operations keep moving. Security maintains oversight. The bottleneck disappears. 

3. Hard-to-Use Tools: The Training Burden 

Every hour your team spends learning a new security tool is an hour not spent on production. Every contractor who needs a training session before they can access a system is a contractor who isn't fixing the problem yet. Industrial programs that get efficiency right choose security solutions their teams can actually use — without a certification program attached. 

The Dispel platform is built for point-and-click workflows with inline documentation — accessible at the moment of need, without requiring a separate training program. Industrial operators shouldn't need a certification to use a remote access tool. 

4. Is the Security Tool Working? — The Topology Problem 

Here's a specific friction point that drove the development of one of the Dispel Zero Trust Engine’s new features. Administrators would set up access for a vendor, the vendor would call and say, "remote access is broken," and the administrator had no immediate way to verify whether the SRA platform was the problem or whether the pathway to the asset was degraded somewhere else in the chain. 

The Dispel platform’s topology view was built specifically to eliminate this conversation. Administrators can see the complete health of every pathway to every asset — before the vendor ever asks. If there's a problem in the chain, the administrator knows it before the vendor call comes in. That's friction removed at the source, not managed after the fact. 

5. Security Adding Steps: The Approval Workflow Trap 

The most corrosive efficiency problem in OT security isn't any one tool — it's the accumulated overhead of doing security correctly when the security process adds friction to every interaction. When security means more steps, people start treating it as optional. When security adds time, teams find ways around it. 

The Dispel platform’s risk-aware approval workflow puts a combined risk score directly in the access window approval view. No additional tool. No additional check. No additional process. The administrator sees green, yellow, or red at the exact moment they're already making the approval decision. Security happens in the workflow — not as an interruption to it. 

What Gets Better When Efficiency Friction Disappears 

The ultimate efficiency problem with high-friction security solutions isn't that they slow teams down in the moment. It's what happens over time: teams stop using the security solution. They find workarounds. The tool may show 100 percent deployment in the asset register, but the actual operational posture is something else entirely. 

When efficiency friction is removed, the sanctioned path becomes the natural path. Vendors connect faster. Maintenance windows get used for maintenance. Approval workflows take seconds rather than creating delays that ripple into production schedules. 

A security solution your team doesn't use isn't protecting your uptime. It's just adding line items to your budget. 

The best OT cybersecurity programs don't choose between security and speed. They build environments where the two reinforce each other — where the access workflow is fast enough that nobody looks for a shortcut, and secure enough that every session is visible and auditable. 

That's the outcome efficiency friction prevents. And it's exactly what the Dispel Zero Trust Engine was designed to deliver. 

This is the second in a three-part series on OT Friction. Blog 1 covers Security Friction and the workaround problem. Blog 3 examines GRC Friction and why audit season doesn't have to be a crisis. 

Learn how OT teams are enabling faster vendor and engineer access. Read the Takepoint Research whitepaper →