- Industrial data fabrics provide unified security by replacing vulnerable point-to-point connections with a single, encrypted data flow system that reduces attack surfaces while breaking down data silos and enabling real-time access across cloud, edge, and on-premises environments.
- By automatically preserving data source location and context, industrial data fabrics eliminate the manual processes that create security vulnerabilities while enabling organizations to make better insight-driven business decisions with unified, accessible data.
- Industrial data fabrics reduce total cost of ownership by eliminating complex maintenance of hundreds of integrations, while simultaneously promoting industry compliance and creating better audit trails for sensitive data protection.
Manufacturing has ranked as the most-attacked industry for cyber criminals for four years in a row, according to the 2025 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index. Unfortunately, it’s not hard to understand the reasons why.
Industrial companies tend to have aging industrial data infrastructures and vast attack surfaces. They’re made up of many extractors and connectors tunneling through fire walls to push data to the enterprise or cloud or horizontally between different business process areas of manufacturing. This setup is ripe for cyber criminals.
In addition to dedicated cybersecurity practices, adopting a data management strategy underpinned by a modern data fabric can help improve industry’s security posture, while benefiting digital transformation efforts.
The industrial data cybersecurity challenge
Data management is a consistent challenge for industrial organizations. Over time, as the volume of industrial data has grown exponentially, manufacturers have accumulated hundreds of point-to-point integrations between on-premises hardware, on-premises apps, and enterprise apps at the edge. As these point-to-point connections proliferate and age, manual upgrades and patching become a maintenance headache. Moreover, each integration represents a potential entry point for cybercriminals, broadening the attack surface and increasing the risk of breaches.
Securing these sprawling systems is often a major stumbling block for industrial organizations, especially as they look to modernize their operations and embrace digital transformation. Traditionally, industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT) environments were kept separate from corporate IT environments, with the belief that the separation between networks could offer a layer of protection.
This air gapping of mission-critical systems from business IT network layers and systems was common in the past, but with the advent of connected devices, the proliferation of sensors and the integration of AI, this approach is no longer sufficient. This type of legacy data management approach, exacerbated by a high total cost of ownership, as well as data context and maintenance challenges, is a major cause for data limitations.
Securely maneuvering the air gap, including secure domain-crossing between different systems in a zero-trust manner, is a critical part of a modern data management strategy and true industrial data fabrics.
Replacing point-to-point data connections
Industry is discovering the benefits of industrial data fabrics, which are best described as scalable data architectures often managed by OT teams in an on-premises or cloud environment. Advanced data fabrics have proven to be a critical tool in data management strategies because they can ingress all OT and IT data types — from time series data to images — historize therm and make the data available in real-time both on premises and in the cloud.
Industrial data fabrics also allow organizations to eradicate the complicated web of point-to-point connections and add context between the OT layer and IT layer. With an industrial data fabric acting as the unifying data and message broker, hyper connectivity can still be established between OT and IT systems across an organization’s geographic and enterprise network. It facilitates the on-premises-to-cloud data flow into a single, encrypted port rather than exposing hundreds of open ports like classical point-to-point protocols do.
By managing OT data following the fabric paradigm, industry can more easily analyze and secure it at a lower total cost of ownership. Moreover, this approach promotes industry compliance and audit trails, ensuring that sensitive data is safely protected, without silos getting in the way.
Eliminating data silos and adding context
Beyond cybersecurity, there are several benefits to eradicating data silos with a fabric-enabled data management strategy.
In years past, fragmented data management practices not only exacerbated cyber risk, but created data silos across the business. In these cases, data tended to be trapped in smart devices, SCADA systems or distributed control systems (DCS) or shared to the cloud without any context. Different departments or systems were tasked with maintaining their own separate databases, thus creating inefficiencies and hindering collaboration. However, as industry continues to embrace digital transformation and AI, the need for unified data access at any level of the organization is becoming even more important.
Industrial data fabrics allow companies to access important data with connections to devices, sensors, cameras and DCS/SCADA systems, as well as break down data silos among these technologies. By doing this, data is not just accessible across cloud, edge and on-premises environments, it will also have the necessary context.
What’s more, an advanced industrial data fabric is aware of a data’s source location and associated context, so the challenging, manual step of moving data and applying context afterward is eliminated. For data to be effective across the organization, it’s important to know where it comes from, when it was collected, what sensors it represents and more.
With the right data management strategy, hyper-connectivity across the organization can be achieved, without maintenance and cybersecurity headaches. As industry continues to take steps toward improving its cybersecurity posture and accelerating digital transformation initiatives, streamlined and centrally managed data paradigms will play an increasingly important role.
Companies prioritizing data management best practices at the data fabric level will shrink their attack surface and be better equipped to rely on their data to make insight-driven decisions about the business.
Dr. Nina Schwalb is vice president, Inmation Industrial Data Fabric, at Emerson’s Aspen Technology business.
