Operational stability proved misleading. Here are the key lessons of 2025 on cyber resilience, automation, and OT.
By Michał Kraus
The year 2025 will be remembered as a time of striking contradictions. While 90% of organizations declared strong cyber readiness, 71% still experienced data breaches. Most companies reported operational stability, yet simultaneously 62% suffered downtime, 49% production delays, and 41% communication issues.
The most important lesson of 2025 is starkly clear: operational stability does not protect against cyberattacks. In many cases, it actually enables them. Organizations interpreted smooth day-to-day operations as proof that their security posture was sufficient. In reality, stable environments often concealed outdated patching routines, undocumented OT assets, and declining vigilance.
The biggest mistake of 2025 was a false sense of security. A lack of full OT visibility, imperfect patching processes, and limited regulatory understanding among mid-level management created a dangerous gap.
Most concerning was the communication divide between technical teams and leadership. While 88% of technical experts identified downtime as a critical operational risk, only 41% of managers shared that concern. This disconnect led to misguided investment priorities and underestimated threats.
Data from 2025 shows unequivocally that automation is not the result of stability, it is its cause. Among stable organizations, 46% had fully automated environments, compared to just 10-13% among unstable ones.
Companies that invested in automation experienced fewer incidents and were better equipped to handle cost pressures and workforce shortages. Automated OT inventories, continuous monitoring, and structured maintenance reduced human error and ensured continuity even when teams were overstretched.
As highlighted in Industry Today’s coverage of industrial automation trends, digital OT transformation has become a foundation of resilience rather than merely a productivity tool.
Analysis of incidents throughout 2025 revealed a recurring pattern of mistakes that significantly increased operational and cybersecurity risk. Many organizations became complacent in patch management, with stability causing patching discipline to drop to 75%. At the same time, hybrid asset management remained widespread, as only 33% of European companies operated fully automated OT inventories, leaving critical blind spots. Persistent silos between IT and OT teams further contributed to inaccurate risk assessments and slow incident response, while over-reliance on single OT or SCADA vendors, particularly in the energy and district heating sectors, reduced flexibility and resilience. Finally, insider threats continued to be underestimated, despite the fact that 43% of organizations experienced insider-related incidents during the year. Many of these risks had already been highlighted in Industry Today’s previous analyses of industrial cybersecurity challenges.
The most resilient organizations of 2025 shared several defining characteristics. First and foremost, they maintained full OT visibility through always-on, automated asset inventories. This eliminated blind spots and enabled fast, accurate decision-making.
Continuous monitoring and predictive maintenance allowed them to prevent failures instead of reacting to them. Clearly defined responsibilities between IT and OT ensured rapid incident handling. Importantly, frameworks such as NIS2 and ISO standards were treated not as compliance obligations but as strategic tools to strengthen long-term resilience.
Across Europe and the Nordics, industry leaders stood out through stable OT environments, strong C-level involvement, and consistent investment in automation and IIoT. Their adoption of real-time vulnerability monitoring was significantly above the market average.
By implementing regulatory frameworks proactively rather than reactively, these organizations built infrastructures better prepared for both operational and cybersecurity challenges, an approach frequently highlighted in Industry Today’s smart factory and IIoT coverage.
Organizations that suffered most in 2025 lacked a single source of truth for OT assets. Hybrid inventories based on spreadsheets, legacy systems, and disconnected tools led to human error, delayed response times, and incorrect assumptions about system status.
“When critical asset data is fragmented, operators lose real-time visibility. A unified, fully automated asset inventory is no longer optional. It is the prerequisite for every other security and reliability capability” – says Michał Kraus, Vice-President of Marketing in AMDT.
Regional differences remained pronounced. Scandinavian companies benefited from more mature OT systems and stricter regulatory oversight but faced access-related incidents due to distributed facilities and high workforce mobility. Continental Europe, with lower automation rates, struggled more with management-level bottlenecks that slowed critical decision-making.
These contrasts clearly show where progress was made in 2025 and where organizations must focus their efforts in 2026.
Michał Kraus, based in Berlin, DE, is currently Vice President Marketing, Global at AMDT. Michał Kraus brings experience from previous roles at AMDT, Userlane and relayr – a MunichRe Company. Kraus holds a 2004 – 2008 Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism & Social Communiaction @ Krakowska Akademia im. Andrzeja Frycza-Modrzewskiego. Kraus’ robust skill set includes public relations, event management, marketing, marketing strategy, marketing communications and more.
AMDT is the global leader in versioning, backup, and OT security solutions for industrial automation — delivering nearly 40 years of innovation and reliability.
Our mission, “Production Resilience Delivered,” reflects what we do best: helping manufacturers recover quickly from IT disruptions and cyberattacks, ensuring production continuity and supply chain stability worldwide.
At the core of our mission is Octoplant, a modular, vendor-independent software platform that tracks and manages every change in industrial automation, configurations, programs, and project data. Through intuitive dashboards and risk prioritization, Octovision empowers decision-makers to identify weak points, improve OT security, and make proactive, data-driven decisions.
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