Operational Technology Cybersecurity Coalition Forms

April 13, 2022

A diverse group of cybersecurity leaders joined together to launch the Operational Technology Cybersecurity Coalition. Founding members include Claroty, Forescout, Honeywell, Nozomi Networks, and Tenable, each with decades of experience in building, protecting, and defending our nation’s industrial control systems and critical infrastructure assets.

The OT Cyber Coalition advocates for vendor-neutral, interoperable, and standards-based cybersecurity solutions and works collaboratively with industry and government stakeholders on how to best deploy data-sharing solutions that enhance our country’s collective defense. Its efforts support the notion that competitive solutions promote innovation and strengthen our national security.

The OT Cyber Coalition represents a broad spectrum of people, processes, and technology, and offers a unique and crucial perspective on the best practices applicable across the entire OT lifecycle.

Through its direct engagements with the US Government, the OT Cyber Coalition will encourage the adoption of interoperability and vendor-neutral cybersecurity characteristics, provide industry expertise, share feedback on public policy proposals, and advocate for increased funding for federal OT cybersecurity.

“Given the significant exposure, a more dangerous set of threat actors, and the risks to national security and society, the government needs to leverage all cyber capabilities at its disposal to protect critical infrastructure,” said Grant Geyer, Chief Product Officer & CISO, Claroty. “No one entity or provider has a monopoly on protecting critical infrastructure, and a vendor-neutral and open standards approach can ensure that we’re all working in concert to keep the country safe.”

“Our combined customer base represents the largest and most impactful organizations in critical infrastructure,” said Shawn Taylor, VP of Threat Defense, Forescout. “We have the potential to collect asset information, vulnerability data, threats and security incidents, and risk status to provide real time insight and data to help support the US government, asset owners and operators as part of our collective defense mission.”

“Although we may be a group of competitive OT cybersecurity companies, we also are extremely passionate about working collaboratively to improve the cybersecurity of these sometimes fragile OT environments,” said Jeff Zindel, Vice President and General Manager of OT Cyber Security for Honeywell Connected Enterprise. “This work is essential to protect our country’s critical infrastructure.”

“To combat the growing number of threats against our critical infrastructure, it is essential that the cybersecurity industry embrace competitive innovation and open information sharing to collectively strengthen defenses,” said Andrea Carcano, Nozomi Networks Co-founder and CPO. “As a founding member of the coalition, we look forward to helping advance these key priorities to fortify the security of our nation’s most critical infrastructure.” 

“Our companies represent the entire OT lifecycle, and can be leveraged strategically by the U.S. Government in an advisory capacity and by critical infrastructure operators to protect themselves and improve our national preparedness,” said Marty Edwards, vice president, Operational Technology Security, Tenable. “We look forward to working together to promote these goals.”