Cybersecurity as the Foundation for Digital Growth: Smart Protection to Smart Transformation

Over the past year, Interstates has facilitated multiple digital transformation (DT) workshops across numerous projects. These workshops are designed to bring the right people into the same room—operations, IT, engineering, and business leaders—to uncover both opportunities and obstacles that don’t surface in day-to-day operations. They allow teams to step back, examine how digital initiatives connect to cybersecurity realities, and recognize where legacy risks could undercut future ambitions.  

What’s been most revealing is that the workshops consistently surface the same theme: 

Digital transformation cannot be separated from cybersecurity. 

Whether the focus is predictive maintenance, cloud historians, or AI readiness, the conversation inevitably circles back to network visibility, segmentation, and governance. And rather than stalling progress, these realizations have helped leaders reframe cybersecurity as the foundation that enables growth—turning potential blockers into opportunities to build trust, alignment, and resilience. Here are the key takeaways from these workshops:  

Takeaway 1: DT Surfaces Cyber Debt  

In several facilities, discussions began with predictive maintenance or data strategy. But when teams mapped their system architecture, they uncovered flat operational technology (OT) networks, undocumented connections, and outdated patching protocols. In one case, a past ransomware incident had faded into memory – until questions arose about how new historians and remote access would be secured. This pattern reflects what industry-wide surveys show: 65% of organizations struggle with integrating legacy OT systems into modern IT frameworks, which leaves risks unaddressed until transformation efforts bring them to light (SANS Institute, 2024).  

The Takeaway Perspective: These discoveries aren’t failures. They are opportunities to build resilience by addressing long-standing risks before scaling new digital initiatives.  

Takeaway 2: OT and IT Misalignment Can Slow Down Progress  

Digital initiatives often expose gaps between IT and OT teams. We’ve seen operations leaders push forward with data collection and condition monitoring, only for IT leaders to learn after the fact. One engineering manager admitted, “We’re just flying by the seat of our pants when it comes to the network.” Research confirms this is not unique: 40% of firms report that IT and OT remain siloed, and only 12% describe them as fully aligned (Amiri & Menting, 2024).  

The Takeaway Perspective: Misalignment is not simply an organizational issue – it’s a security and resilience issue. Facilitating early conversations between IT and OT ensures that progress isn’t delayed later by audits, incidents, or incompatible systems.

Takeaway 3: Cybersecurity Enables Not Just Compliance, But Transformation 

Too often, cybersecurity is framed as insurance—something to satisfy compliance or avoid fines. But in practice, well-designed security makes new ways of working possible. We’ve seen organizations leverage network segmentation, secure conduits, and structured patching to improve reliability and enable remote access or centralized monitoring. According to ABI Research, 87% of leaders now view Zero Trust as the long-term path for OT environments (Amiri & Menting, 2024). And ISA/IEC 62443 reinforces that security should be aligned to business and operational risk, not just regulatory minimums (International Society of Automation, 2024).  

The Takeaway Perspective: Cybersecurity can be a springboard – supporting innovation, scalability, and efficiency in ways that compliance-driven approaches alone cannot.  

Reflection Questions for Leaders 

As digital transformation accelerates, these questions can spark valuable conversations inside your organization: 

1. How visible and segmented is your OT network today? Without clarity, it can be difficult to trust the data flowing across it.
2. Are your IT and OT teams consistently engaged in cybersecurity planning? Alignment can reduce delays and strengthen resilience.
3. How are you securing the tools that come with transformation, such as historians, mobile devices, or cloud-connected sensors? Each one adds value. Each one also expands the attack surface. 

Where This Leaves Us 

Cybersecurity and digital transformation are no longer parallel tracks – they are one journey. Every client conversation, every workshop, every site visit reinforces this truth. For leaders, the question is not whether transformation will surface security concerns. It’s how early you want to address them – and how prepared you want to be when they appear. As trusted advisors, our role isn’t to dictate a roadmap but to help you explore possibilities, uncover risks, and build a foundation that supports both security and growth. Because in the end, transformation isn’t just about dashboards or data. It’s about enabling change that is secure, sustainable, and resilient.