OT Incident Response: When You Can’t Pull the Plug
A unidirectional network enforces one-way data flow, letting data center operators contain a cyber incident without cutting off critical infrastructure. When a cyber incident hits critical data center infrastructure, the obvious response—disconnect, isolate, shut down—may not be an option.
Why Can’t Data Centers Simply Disconnect During a Cyber Incident?
Data centers depend on continuous operation across interconnected IT and operational technology (OT) systems. Meeting data center security standards means security teams need a way to contain threats without creating a second crisis through unnecessary downtime or loss of critical services.
What Does Forrester’s New OT Incident Response Report Cover?
Forrester’s new report, “When You Can’t Just Pull The Plug: Designing Incident Response For OT,” examines how security leaders can build incident response strategies that account for the safety, availability, and physical-process constraints of operational environments.
The challenge: As data center infrastructure becomes increasingly interconnected, incident response plans must account for environments where availability is mission-critical and containment decisions can have immediate operational consequences.
What Is the Path Forward for Data Center Incident Response?
- Plan for containment before an incident occurs—not just recovery after the fact.
- Identify critical boundaries, dependencies, and escalation paths across IT and operational environments.
- Design security architecture that can help isolate threats while preserving essential operations with hardware-backed controls like data diodes.
- Align security, operations, and business stakeholders around an executable incident response strategy.
For data center operators, the implication is clear: resilience depends not only on how quickly you detect a threat, but on whether your architecture gives you a safe way to contain it.
How Do Data Diodes Support Incident Containment?
Owl’s Owl Talon® data diode suite provides hardware-enforced, protocol-aware one-way data transfer to help organizations maintain access to critical operational data while preventing threats from moving back into protected environments. This unidirectional network architecture gives data center operators a practical, high assurance cybersecurity path to stronger containment without relying solely on software-defined controls. For environments that also require secure tactical communications across classification levels, Owl offers Cross Domain Solutions built on the same hardware-enforced approach. Learn more about how data diodes work or explore Owl’s Cross Domain Solutions.
Download the Forrester report to explore how security leaders can build coordinated, executable OT incident response strategies—and strengthen operational resilience when incidents occur.
Did you know?
More than 1,000 deployments across critical infrastructure, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Intelligence Community trust Owl Cyber Defense to help protect their most sensitive environments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a data diode?
A data diode is a hardware-enforced, unidirectional network device that physically allows data to move in only one direction, blocking any path back into a protected OT environment while still enabling critical data sharing.
How is OT incident response different from IT incident response?
OT incident response must account for physical-process, safety, and availability constraints that don’t apply in traditional IT environments, since containment actions like isolation or shutdown can disrupt operations or create safety risks.
Why does containment planning matter as much as OT threat detection?
Fast detection alone doesn’t reduce risk if a security architecture forces a choice between shutting down operations or leaving a threat active; containment planning ensures teams can act without triggering unnecessary downtime.