Model, analyze, and prioritize cyber risk across oil and gas OT environments without disrupting real-time operations.
Oil and gas operations depend on complex operational technology that must perform safely, continuously, and reliably. From control systems and PLCs to safety systems, historians, and field devices, these capabilities are built to support uptime continuity and process integrity. That same complexity also creates cybersecurity challenges that are difficult to manage with visibility tools alone.
This challenge is the focus of our latest whitepaper, “Operational Technology (OT) Cybersecurity in Natural Gas and Oil Refineries.”
The paper examines the cybersecurity realities facing refinery and process-control environments, including legacy infrastructure, IT-OT convergence, exposure to remote access, limited asset visibility, and the growing need to align cyber risk management with safety and operational priorities.
Many organizations already use strong tools for network monitoring, logging, and vulnerability awareness. Those capabilities are important, but they do not always answer the questions that matter most in an OT environment: how are systems actually connected; where do attack paths exist; which assets are most critical to operations, and how risk and mitigations be documented so as to supports operational, engineering, and compliance needs.
The whitepaper explains how ASSURANT™ helps address that gap through model-based cyber analysis. By allowing teams to model both IT and OT architectures, ASSURANT™ supports a more complete understanding of system relationships, dependencies, and segmentation boundaries. That makes it easier to identify exposed paths, validate security assumptions, and understand how a vulnerability in one part of the environment could affect operational outcomes in other parts.
Another major theme is network segmentation. In oil and gas environments, segmentation is not just a design preference, it is a core control that limits lateral movement and reduces the operational impact of a cyber event. In the whitepaper we discuss the way ASSURANT™ can be used to evaluate existing and proposed segmentation strategies, simulate attacker movement, and help teams determine whether critical process and control zones are truly isolated as intended.
The paper also highlights the importance of asset visibility and the context of vulnerability. In many OT environments, especially those with long equipment lifecycles, in which teams must work with a mix of legacy and modern systems that are not always fully documented. ASSURANT™ helps organizations build and maintain a structured representation of those environments, cross-reference assets against vulnerability data, and support risk-based prioritization rather than treating every issue as equally urgent.
Incident response is another area of great concern. In oil and gas operations, incident response must account for more than technical recovery. It also has to consider process continuity, safety, environmental consequences, and operational decision-making. By documenting attack paths, dependencies, and critical assets in advance, ASSURANT™ can help teams prepare for scenarios, enhance tabletop exercises, and respond more quickly and clearly when an event occurs.
The whitepaper also discusses compliance and reporting as an integrated part of cybersecurity management rather than a separate afterthought. Security teams are often expected to support regulatory requirements, internal governance needs, and executive communication using information gathered from multiple tools and teams. ASSURANT™ helps connect modeled architectures, vulnerabilities, mitigations, and risk analysis into report-ready outputs that improve traceability and reduce manual documentation effort.
The message is straightforward: protecting oil and gas OT environments requires more than monitoring alone. It requires context, analysis, and a practical way to connect system architecture, cyber risk, and documentation into a unified workflow. The current whitepaper shines a spotlight on all these issues. ASSURANT™ is well-positioned to help organizations strengthen cyber resilience across complex industrial operations.
