Back to case studiesIT/OT foundations across 100+ food plants worldwide
Inside a global IT/OT foundations program: one security baseline for 100+ factories — segmented networks, governed remote access, inventoried assets — rolled out wave by wave without stopping production.
100+
production sites on one IT/OT foundation standard
Zero
production downtime as the operating standard
Context
A global food and beverage manufacturer runs more than a hundred production sites across six regions — dairies, beverage plants, water sites, specialized nutrition. Each factory grew its own operational technology over decades: different networks, different vendors, different habits. Corporate launched a single program to bring every plant onto one common IT/OT foundation, and I operated inside it as the IT/OT manager for the national factory footprint — translating a global standard into running production lines.
The problem it fixes
Before foundations, the average plant looked the same everywhere: flat networks with no real boundary between office IT and the control layer, direct internet exposure on OT equipment, assets nobody had inventoried, vendor remote access granted ad hoc and trusted by default, no backup of controller programs, patchy endpoint protection, and shared generic accounts on the shop floor. Every site was different, so nobody could answer the basic question — how secure is this plant? — and production calendars meant nothing could be fixed by stopping the line.
The idea: one measurable standard
Instead of auditing each plant into a custom report, the program defined a fixed foundation: a set of controls mapped to identify, protect, detect and respond, identical for every site. Each plant is scored against the same KPI, rolled up into regional dashboards and a single executive summary. Designs are validated once — engineering and security sign-off — then every plant deploys the same thing. The shift is from opinions about security to a number that moves, plant by plant, month by month.
The solutions it provides
On the network: a standard industrial LAN design with real segmentation, a filtering gateway between IT and OT, and the removal of direct internet access from the control layer. On access: managed VPN for staff and governed privileged remote access for vendors and service engineers — tested against real controllers before rollout. On visibility: full OT asset inventory with network monitoring, recurring vulnerability discovery, and plant security maturity surveys. On endpoints and recovery: centrally managed protection for OT assets, structured patch management, backup and restore for controller programs, managed mobile devices for the floor, and industrial identity to end shared generic accounts.
Rollout at scale
Plants moved in waves — the lead wave first, then the rest — with the most critical sites prioritized. Every new design started as a pilot in a handful of volunteer plants; only validated designs went global, shipped with deployment kits so local teams executed instead of reinventing. Each region carried a concrete action list per site, reviewed on a monthly rhythm, with executive attention going exactly where the dashboard showed red. That is how a standard survives contact with a hundred different realities.
Results
The lead wave reached near-complete foundation scores, and every plant in the program became measurable on the same scale for the first time — identify, protect, detect, respond, each with its own trajectory. The delivery model itself became the asset: validate once, deploy everywhere, track monthly. And the operating constraint held throughout — the lines kept producing while the foundation under them was rebuilt.
Next steps
This is the exact work INOPSIO runs today: inventory the OT estate, segment IT from OT, govern every remote path in, and build Industry 4.0 on that base. If your plants look like these did at the start — unmeasured, unsegmented, unknown — a free assessment call is a short conversation away.
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