Manufacturing Evolution and a CISO’s First Principle

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The dynamic between your Chief Manufacturing Officer (CMO), focused on process optimization and efficiency, and your Chief Digital/Technology Officer (CD/TO), pushing for rapid automation and digitalization, presents a common challenge. This is amplified by vendor roadmaps trending towards SaaS-only solutions, while your operational reality involves a complex blend of IT/OT and cloud/on-premises systems. For Manufacturing CISOs, this often means navigating the delicate balance between embracing Industry 4.0 innovation and ensuring consistent operational security. At Google, we envision a better path forward: one that harmonizes the pursuit of innovation with the necessity for safe, secure, and compliant operations.

The three part blog series on Security Inclusive Site Management will explore the Manufacturing CISO’s security first principles, threat-informed strategic and operational security, and a tactical blueprint to manufacturing security.

Manufacturing evolution: A CISO’s approach to security

Inspired by: Digital Plant Maturity Model

Manufacturing has evolved from traditional mechanical and electrical machines to today's landscape of smart devices, often connected through a combination of serial and IP-based networks. Contemporary manufacturing facilities showcase this convergence of on-premises and cloud computing infrastructure, SaaS applications, on-premises and hybrid systems such as the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Historian, and SCADA, in addition to the core manufacturing machines. This industrial transformation is not random— it is driven by a fundamental set of influencers:

• Asset owners’ drive to improve and optimize processes to deliver higher quality products and services; 
• Product vendors’ shift towards more intelligent hardware and software allowing their customers to extract more value from their products; 
• Customer demand for faster production with higher quality needs at lower costs and greater transparency; 
• Regulatory bodies’ efforts to stay up-to-date on changes and working towards new standards and compliance requirements; 
• Adversaries' continuously ever-evolving tradecraft.

Despite the changing landscape, the CISO’s first principles of security and safety remain unchanged: safeguarding critical business processes, associated engineering operations, and pertinent crown jewels to ensure their safety, security, and reliability. 

While CMOs and CD/TOs often spearhead business-driven transformations, the CISO is pivotal in enabling their vision. The CISOs core principles must prioritize security, safety, reliability, and productivity by protecting critical business and engineering processes. Acting as the trusted risk advisor to both the CMO and CD/TO, the CISO facilitates secure organizational transformation. To effectively contribute to this journey, CISOs should evaluate the impact of manufacturing and automation goals on the following areas: organization (strategic), engineering (operational), customers, risk posture and response, compliance, and resilience and business continuity. Based on this evaluation, CISOs should offer security recommendations and take actions across all phases of the transformation project lifecycle. The table below details a manufacturing CISO’s evaluation criteria and pertinent actions across those impact areas.

Impact Area	Discovery & Impact	Actions
Strategy	Assess the impact of manufacturing and automation goals on security. Identify opportunities to improve security	Enumerate complementing security functions with demonstrable impact on business revenue Evaluate and enumerate how the security objectives can support business continuity and minimize downtime with the least cost.
Operations	Assess the impact of manufacturing and automation goals on visibility, access controls, data security, privacy, safety, productivity, reliability, and product quality Identify opportunities to improve quality of security data	Incorporate security requirements from the earliest stages of roadmaps to ensure security is baked in rather than an afterthought. Enumerate and implement appropriate and cost-effective control coverage to prevent adversaries from disrupting operations
Customer Trust	Assess customer-centric security concerns (anticipated & evidenced) that impact trust	Deploy controls to achieve reliable delivery & availability, protection of intellectual property, & assurance of product integrity to improve trust
Risk Posture and Response	Analyze the change in overall risk posture and exploitability of relevant threats	Enhance security operations, use zero trust & defense-in-depth models. Make exploitation difficult & raise the adversary’s cost of attack
Compliance	Evaluate the impact on governance and compliance.  Identify opportunities to streamline security assessments and demonstrate compliance	Deploy necessary security controls to achieve adequate security. Use automated telemetry and evidence collection to demonstrate auditability and compliance with the regulatory requirements
Resilience & Business Continuity	Assess the impact on cyber-physical resilience  Discover minimal required operations for critical business continuity	Ensure that the business and engineering processes maintain a minimal acceptable level of performance even under attack. This allows for operational continuity and minimizes disruption in the face of adversity

CISOs are the vital revenue protectors for the organization. Demonstrating value-added collaboration with the CMO and CD/TO enables CISOs to successfully present security as an inclusive element of the business, dispelling any notion of it being a mere add-on function. In partnership with the CMO and CD/TO, the CISOs must produce a roadmap to migrate from pursuing Security as a separate organizational function to embedding it as an integrated function to all business and engineering processes. Articulating and communicating this integrated security mindset is crucial, and so is its implementation through strategic, operational, and tactical lenses.

In the next blog of this series, we will discuss the threat-informed and risk-centric strategic and operational aspects of a secure manufacturing site management roadmap.