Winning Leadership Support for OT Cybersecurity Initiatives. Most leaders understand the importance of protecting industrial operations from cyberthreats. Yet leaders must continually balance investments in cybersecurity against other organizational priorities and initiatives. Added to the balancing act, specialized knowledge of industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT) may be limited among organizational leaders, along with insights into modern cybersecurity approaches, tools and processes needed to protect ICS/OT systems. IT leaders may see that OT resources are less vulnerable to attack when compared to digital IT resources including networks, servers, and databases. That’s because OT resources historically have been isolated from IT networks, and have had few, if any, external connections that would give an adversary an avenue for attack. IT leaders also believed the risk of an attacker targeting industrial systems was low, rooted in the belief that there’s little value for attackers in OT environments – such as no personally identifiable information (PII) or credit card numbers to steal.