Protecting Mission-Critical Infrastructure: The Role of CIOs in Ensuring Operational Security
Protecting the world’s most crucial infrastructure—spanning manufacturing, healthcare, and data centers—relies on CIOs' ability to prioritize operational security as a vital business continuity measure. Downtime and tampering with operational environments have significant, often catastrophic, effects on business continuity, as evidenced by a recent cyberattack on refrigeration systems in France, affecting multiple large supermarket chains. This attack led to substantial food waste, customer availability disruptions, and financial losses, with the extent of damage still under assessment.
Such costly operational disruptions are not isolated incidents; Claroty’s 2026 global survey reveals that over half (51%) of CIOs have experienced operational downtime due to cyber incidents targeting their organization’s cyber-physical systems (CPS). High-profile attacks in recent years, such as the Stryker healthcare supply chain attacks and the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack, further underscore these risks. With 27% of CIOs reporting downtime lasting 3-7 days from their most significant CPS-related incident, the financial and operational losses can be in the millions.
These severe impacts stem from the growing complexity and scale of threats to operational environments, driven by:
- The convergence of IT and Operational Technology (OT)
- Rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Widespread third-party exposure
Addressing these challenges demands a unified, outcome-oriented, cross-functional approach from CIOs to mitigate business risks.
Integrate Resilience into Business Continuity and Recovery
Current approaches to securing operational environments often fail to address risk adequately, leaving organizations vulnerable. CIOs must balance proving security outcomes to meet executive mandates while navigating organizational and digital transformation. Although 64% of CIOs have integrated IT and CPS security governance and risk management, they have not yet unified these processes with business continuity planning, with 54% expressing only moderate confidence in the inclusion of CPS in their recovery plans.
Modernizing business continuity plans for operations is essential. CIOs can:
- Achieve unified governance across IT and OT by investing in real-time visibility and risk management tools.
- Develop a structured, scenario-driven playbook with regular cyber-attack drills and recovery workflows tailored to operational environments.
These steps ensure that critical operations can withstand, respond to, and quickly recover from cyber disruptions, safeguarding business outcomes.
Implement a Practical Framework for Operational Resilience
To harness operational resilience, CIOs should:
- Reorient programmatic protection towards measurable operational resilience, reducing fragmentation by establishing a unified IT and operational governance model.
- Transition beyond conventional IT failovers in business continuity and disaster recovery strategies, incorporating comprehensive operational recovery measures.
- Mandate routine simulation exercises to evaluate offline system recovery, manual overrides, and segmented safety mechanisms, ensuring revenue protection and physical safety.