Transcript
friction point I see a lot. I was lucky enough in the facilities I worked at that we had a pretty good relationship starting out. You know, our engineering teams were able to work with our IT teams very well. I think it was driven a lot by the OT side. So we were able to kind of pull in the IT guys for expertise and to help us understand the networking and the security stuff more. And then we slowly built up from there and it was able to, we had a really fruitful relationship. It was a really good thing. What I've seen fail a lot of times is where you see like a corporate mandate. I see this a lot in my current job and like when I was at Schender Electric is you have a corporate mandate. Your IT team shows up on site and they say, we're going to go do security. And then they run into the wall of, you know, the OT guys saying, what are you doing? You can't touch my equipment. It's my site. I'm not going to work with you. And I think a lot of that stems from a misunderstanding of the amount of effort and work that it takes to do stuff on the OT side. It's not that simple. These are operational systems. We need to have the buy-in from the local folks to do that sort of thing. And so we really want to get them involved early. The teams that I've seen have the most success do that, right? They bring in folks ideally from each site if they can, so that they can have local engineers not only give them feedback, but then turn around and sell the project back to the local folks, right? There's a lot of benefit that can come from these types of security programs. I've talked before about how it can give your OT guys an updated inventory that can tell them when changes are coming to their system. They don't have to go walk everything down to figure out where devices are, right? All these sort of things can benefit your OT engineers. And so having work like that, I think, can be very helpful. Also, ultimately, you know, security has a goal. We're trying to help protect the safety and operation of these systems, and that's a goal everybody shares, right? Your entire company cares a lot about that. And so that's a thing that's a really strong shared mission that you can have between your IT and your OT folks. So those are things that I've seen work really, really well. And again, the most important thing that I think, you know, the most important advice I can have is to have these teams work together early and don't, you know, don't just add them on as an afterthought, because that ultimately leads to friction when you start trying to do work on site or do things like that.
