There’s this quiet fiction inside a lot of large organizations.
IT and OT are “separate.” Different cultures. Different constraints. Different priorities. So we built different security stacks and convinced ourselves that stitching them together later would be manageable.
It isn’t.
I’ve walked into SOC rooms where analysts can pivot from an Active Directory anomaly to a cloud workload in seconds… and then hit a wall the moment traffic touches the industrial side. Different tools. Different telemetry. Different people. Suddenly the investigation slows down and everyone starts speaking carefully, like they’ve entered a museum.
Meanwhile the network doesn’t care about our internal boundaries. It just forwards packets.
For years I’ve seen the same progression play out.
At first, OT security is dismissed. “These systems are isolated.” They never are.
Then comes the responsible phase: “We need a dedicated OT security team.” In theory, great. In practice, try hiring enough people who deeply understand industrial protocols and security operations at the same time. IT security is already stretched thin with brutal turnover. The OT talent pool is smaller and more specialized. Most organizations can’t scale that model globally.
Eventually someone pragmatic says what should have been obvious from the start: the IT SOC has to secure OT as well. Not with a separate universe of dashboards. With the same operational machinery.
That only works if the SOC can actually see OT assets the way it sees everything else.
A global SOC leader from a major industrial group once told me, very calmly, “Before we talk about protecting OT, I want my SOC to see it.” No grand strategy. Just visibility first. If it looks like an asset, behaves like an asset, and produces structured telemetry like any other asset, the SOC can reason about it.
The problem is that most hybrid environments don’t produce a coherent picture. You get IT logs that are structured and searchable. You get OT data that is vendor-specific, partially decoded, sometimes raw packet captures nobody has time to analyze. You end up correlating events across formats that were never meant to coexist.
I’ve watched analysts manually align timestamps between systems because one stack uses local time and another uses UTC. I’ve seen incidents where the IT side showed lateral movement but nobody could confirm what the industrial devices were actually doing during the same window. By the time someone dug into packet captures, the operational impact had already happened.
This is where NANO Corp decided to stop arguing about convergence and focus on something simpler: reality at the wire.
Instead of forcing OT into IT’s tooling model, or asking IT analysts to become protocol archaeologists, NANO extracts structured L2 to L7 metadata everywhere. Standard servers. Legacy industrial controllers. Edge segments. Hybrid links. Same normalized model.
MAC addresses are not “special OT data.” They are identifiers. Sessions are sessions. Flows are flows. Whether the traffic originates from a modern workload or a 15-year-old PLC, the metadata lands in the same structure.
That sounds almost boring. It isn’t. Consistency is what makes automation possible.
Because once the data is coherent, MAIA can actually reason over it.
MAIA does not generate pretty summaries. It traces relationships. An unusual industrial protocol exchange can be tied back to an initiator in the IT zone. A spike in traffic between two controllers can be validated against baseline behavior. A suspicious connection across a hybrid boundary can be reconstructed without exporting CSV files and praying the columns line up.
The difference is operational. Investigations stop being split between “IT incidents” and “OT exceptions.” They become investigations across one network surface.
And yes, this has consequences.
Without a unified view, you get finger-pointing. IT blames OT segmentation. OT blames network architecture. Weeks later someone produces a forensic report that explains what happened long after the fact. That’s not defense. That’s documentation.
With a consistent source of truth feeding an intelligent reasoning layer, the SOC can move at machine speed across domains that used to feel foreign. The industrial floor stops being a blind spot and becomes just another part of the attack surface.
None of this requires pretending IT and OT are identical. They’re not. One side is obsessed with uptime because downtime can mean safety incidents or regulatory exposure. The other side is obsessed with identity and data control. Both are valid.
But attackers don’t file tickets before crossing zones.
If your SOC cannot follow a conversation from a cloud workload into a plant network and back out again without switching mental models, you don’t have unified security. You have adjacent security.
So the real question isn’t whether you have separate tools for IT and OT. Most organizations do.
The real question is simpler and a little uncomfortable:
When something moves across your hybrid network at 2:13 a.m., can your SOC see it as one continuous story?
Or does the story fracture the moment it crosses into OT?
