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10/07/2026 4:16 pm
TL;DR: Microsegmentation paired with CPS visibility is being framed as a resilience control for OT because one compromised connection can become an entire production outage, according to ColorTokens. The deeper issue is not visibility alone but whether identity and network controls can limit lateral movement before operational systems become unrecoverable.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by ColorTokens: Operational Resilience Starts with Risk-Intelligent Microsegmentation
By the numbers:
- 50% of organisations are onboarding new vaults without proper security approval, introducing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations from the outset.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce lateral movement risk in OT environments?
A: Security teams should reduce lateral movement risk by enforcing explicit communication boundaries between operational assets, not by relying on visibility alone.
Q: Why do OT and CPS environments need microsegmentation more than ordinary IT networks?
A: OT and CPS environments often contain systems that cannot be quickly patched, restarted, or recovered without operational impact.
Q: What do teams get wrong when they treat asset discovery as containment?
A: Teams get it wrong when they assume that knowing what is connected means they have reduced risk.
Practitioner guidance
- Map operational communication paths before enforcing policy Build a path-level inventory of which OT, IoT, and CPS assets talk to each other, then classify those paths by business criticality and recovery impact.
- Prioritise segmentation by blast radius, not by asset count Rank segmentation work by the systems whose compromise would stop production, threaten safety, or block recovery.
- Simulate policy changes before enforcement Test new allow and deny rules in a staging or simulation workflow before pushing them into live operational environments.
What's in the full article
ColorTokens's full post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The integration brief showing how Claroty xDome context is mapped into segmentation policy decisions.
- Examples of OT and IoT asset attributes that improve communication-path analysis before enforcement.
- The list of SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and vulnerability integrations used to enrich segmentation context.
- How Gatekeeper extends agentless enforcement to legacy and unpatchable systems.
👉 Read ColorTokens's post on risk-intelligent microsegmentation for OT resilience →
Risk-intelligent microsegmentation for OT: are your controls keeping up?
Explore further
10/07/2026 4:19 pm
Microsegmentation is becoming an identity control problem, not just a network control problem. Once OT and CPS communications are treated as policy-governed access paths, the operational question shifts from discovery to authorisation. That makes the control stack more relevant to IAM, PAM, and NHI governance than many OT teams historically assumed. Practitioners should treat every machine-to-machine path as a governed entitlement, not a passive route.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- 44% of NHI tokens are exposed in the wild, being sent or stored over platforms like Teams, Jira tickets, Confluence pages, and code commits, according to The 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when segmentation failures let a compromise spread through operational systems?
A: Accountability should sit with the teams that own operational policy, identity governance, and change control, not only with the SOC. In connected environments, segmentation is a resilience control, so its failure is a programme issue that cuts across security operations, infrastructure, and OT leadership.
👉 Read our full editorial: Risk-intelligent microsegmentation reshapes OT lateral movement control
