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12/07/2026 12:20 pm
TL;DR: As IT and OT converge, the attack surface expands into industrial systems, vendor connections, and legacy devices that were never built for open lateral movement, according to ColorTokens. The governance challenge is no longer just segmentation design, but whether identity, access, and containment controls can be enforced without disrupting operations.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by ColorTokens: Zero Trust Microsegmentation with ColorTokens’ Progressive Segmentation for IT and OT Convergence in Industry 4.0
By the numbers:
- ColorTokens says its Progressive Segmentation approach can cut deployment time by up to 70% compared with traditional microsegmentation solutions.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when IT and OT networks are not segmented?
A: When IT and OT are not segmented, ransomware can move from business systems into production systems, and defenders often cannot prove where compromise stops.
Q: Why do converged industrial environments complicate Zero Trust Architecture?
A: Zero Trust assumes every access path can be continuously verified and constrained, but industrial environments often depend on legacy protocols, vendor maintenance paths, and devices that cannot support uniform controls.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about microsegmentation?
A: They often treat it as a one-time network redesign instead of an iterative control that depends on current workload behaviour.
Practitioner guidance
- Map trust boundaries across IT and OT Document every route that crosses between business systems, industrial controls, vendor portals, and remote administration paths.
- Treat vendor access as privileged access Apply time-bounded approvals, explicit protocol limits, and per-system scoping to maintenance and supply chain access into OT.
- Separate agented and agentless enforcement domains Inventory which servers, workstations, and OT devices can support host agents and which require gateway or network-based controls.
What's in the full article
ColorTokens' full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Policy simulation and live-traffic testing workflow for staged microsegmentation enforcement
- Host agent and agentless gatekeeper deployment patterns for mixed IT, OT, and legacy device estates
- Protocol-level containment examples for RDP, SSH, SMB, and WinRM in converged environments
- Architecture details for integrating segmentation policy with IAM, SIEM, and CMDB systems
👉 Read ColorTokens' analysis of progressive segmentation for IT and OT convergence →
IT/OT microsegmentation and the governance gap teams miss?
Explore further
12/07/2026 12:34 pm
Progressive segmentation is becoming a governance control, not just a network control. In converged industrial environments, the question is no longer only whether traffic can be filtered. It is whether access paths can be described, approved, and limited in ways that align with operational risk and industrial process safety. That makes segmentation part of identity and access governance for workloads, vendors, and privileged operators. Practitioners should treat it as a control over trust boundaries, not merely a routing decision.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should industrial organisations govern supplier and partner access across multiple systems?
A: They should govern supplier and partner access through the same lifecycle rules used for employees, with individual identities, role-based provisioning, certification, and automatic revocation when the business relationship changes. The key is to treat external access as part of the core identity programme, not as a separate portal problem.
👉 Read our full editorial: IT/OT microsegmentation is becoming a control-plane problem
