From Insight to Action: What the 2025 SANS ICS/OT Security Report Means for You

For organizations operating critical infrastructure, security doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s measured in uptime, safety, and resilience. The SANS State of ICS/OT Security 2025 report, sponsored by Fortinet, is based on insights from over 330 professionals worldwide and offers a clear snapshot of the industry's current state. This year’s report highlights progress in threat intelligence adoption, persistent challenges in remote access, and the ongoing need to reduce incident response times.

This year’s findings reveal clear priorities for every organization working to protect critical infrastructure.

Incidents Remain High and Disruptive

According to the report, 21.5% of organizations reported a cybersecurity incident in the past year. Of those, nearly half experienced an outage that disrupted operations. And 20% took more than a month to remediate. These are not isolated events; they’re indicators of systemic exposure within interconnected operational environments.

Critical takeaway: Treat mean time to recovery (MTTR) as a board-level metric.

Reducing response time requires unified visibility across IT and OT networks, as well as automated playbooks that can contain and recover more quickly. Fortinet’s OT Security Platform delivers this integration, providing security teams with centralized control and real-time insight across all assets, including those in harsh industrial or outdoor environments.

SANS 2025 ICS/OT Survey Webcast & Forum: The State of ICS/OT Cybersecurity | OT

Remote Access Is Still the Weak Link

Half of all reported incidents stemmed from unauthorized external access; yet only 13% of organizations have implemented advanced access controls, such as session recording or OT-aware authentication. As industrial systems become increasingly connected, remote access is both a necessity and a major attack vector.

Critical takeaway: Replace ad hoc remote connectivity with secure, monitored access.

Solutions like FortiPAM privileged access management enable teams to schedule and control vendor sessions, log every keystroke, and automatically rotate credentials, eliminating the blind spots that attackers often exploit. For plants and field assets, secure remote access must evolve from convenience to compliance-grade assurance.

Threat Intelligence Drives Measurable Improvement

One of the most significant findings from SANS this year is that organizations utilizing ICS-specific threat intelligence were significantly more successful in improving segmentation, monitoring, and detection. Context-aware intelligence empowers teams to prioritize the most critical alerts, safeguard key systems, and stay ahead of evolving threats and tactics.

Critical takeaway: Integrate OT-specific intelligence directly into your defenses.

FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services for Operational Technology enhance FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls by adding industrial threat context and delivering detection and policy automation tailored to OT devices and protocols. By aligning real-world intelligence with network enforcement, organizations can convert insight into immediate defensive action.

From Benchmark to Blueprint

The State of ICS/OT Security 2025 report serves as both a benchmark and a call to action. Rising attack rates and regulatory tightening are converging to demand stronger alignment between IT and OT security strategies. Building resilience means moving beyond perimeter defenses toward identity-based access, network segmentation, and continuous visibility across every industrial control layer.

Critical takeaway: Benchmark, prioritize, and automate.

Use the SANS report data to identify where your environment lags behind industry norms, then focus investment where it will yield the most measurable risk reduction. Whether it’s closing access control gaps, integrating OT threat intelligence, or accelerating incident recovery, the path forward is clear: Insight only matters if it leads to action.

Turning Data into Defense

The SANS State of ICS/OT Security 2025 report isn’t just another industry snapshot. It’s a mirror held up to the state of operational security worldwide. The findings reveal both the scale of the challenge and the opportunity for progress. With the right combination of threat intelligence, secure access, and integrated visibility, organizations can reduce risk across every edge and maintain the continuity that critical infrastructure demands.

Watch the full webinar with SANS and Fortinet’s Richard Springer as they discuss the state of ICS/OT Cybersecurity and its implications for OT environments.

Download the full report to see how your organization compares and the critical next steps you can take toward operational resilience.