OT and IT used to be separate.
They're not anymore — and that's where most attacks land.
We do information security and AI governance for manufacturers and distributors — discrete and process, OEM and contract — where downtime is measured in dollars per minute and customer audits arrive without warning. The work isn't just the office network. It's everything that keeps the line running.
Three places we usually find people.
Manufacturing has been the most-attacked sector for ransomware three years running. The pressure shows up in different forms — a customer questionnaire, a peer's bad week, a strange device on the network — but the underlying question is always the same: can the line keep running, and can you prove it.
Your biggest customer wants a SOC 2 by Q3 — or you lose the contract.
Procurement attached the requirement to the renewal. The audit firm wants $80k and 12 months. Your team thinks SOC 2 is something accountants do. Meanwhile the contract represents a quarter of next year's revenue, and the deadline isn't moving. You need a real plan, not a pitch deck.
A peer manufacturer was ransomware'd. They were down for 14 days.
Same size, same industry, same town. They lost two weeks of production, paid a ransom they swore they wouldn't pay, and are still rebuilding trust with their biggest customers six months later. Your IT vendor says you're "fine." Your insurance carrier disagrees. You'd rather find out which one is right while you have time to act.
An AI vision system is running on your line. Nobody knows what data it's collecting.
A vendor sold it as "AI-powered quality control." It came with a network connection, a cloud account, and a contract nobody on your side fully read. It's looking at the floor twenty-four hours a day. You don't know what it sends back, where it goes, or whether your IP is part of the training set. The vendor's answer is "trust us." That answer is no longer good enough.
Six concrete pieces of work. Done in plain language.
Compliance vendors love acronyms. Customers want receipts. Operators want the line to keep running. We translate among all three — and we know that controls which break the line don't survive the first deadline week.
Customer audit / SOC 2 readiness.
When your enterprise customer wants a SOC 2 by Q3, we get you there — or tell you whether a less-expensive equivalent will satisfy what they actually need. The questionnaire answers, the underlying controls, the audit firm coordination. We've sat in these procurement calls and we know what closes them.
OT segmentation & ICS hardening.
Following NIST 800-82 and IEC 62443 — practically, not theatrically. Your PLCs and HMIs don't need to live on the same network as your accounting laptops. We segment, harden, and monitor without breaking what's been running for years. The line keeps running. The attack surface gets a lot smaller.
AI governance for quality, vision & planning.
Which AI tools your team can use on production data, what your vendor contracts should actually say, what stays on premise versus what goes to the cloud. We do the diligence on the AI vision system, the production planning copilot, and the predictive maintenance vendor — before they're integrated, not after.
Ransomware preparedness & incident response.
When something happens at 3 AM, we're the people who answer. Pre-built runbooks, immutable backups your team has actually tested restoring, and a recovery sequence that gets the line running before you reach day three. The peer who got hit didn't have this. You can.
Supply chain & vendor risk management.
A real inventory of who's connected to your network, what data flows out, and which vendors could take you down if they got hit. Tier-1 customers, key suppliers, EDI integrations, MES vendors. We get the agreements right, the diligence done annually, and the answers ready before your biggest customer asks.
CMMC if you serve DoD.
If you have a defense customer or are a sub on a DoD contract, CMMC requirements are arriving — Level 1 for FCI, Level 2 for CUI. We've built CMMC programs for manufacturers and we know how to scope them tight. Or read our Defense Contractors page for the full picture.
Three things you won't get from an office IT shop.
We understand OT, not just IT.
PLCs that have been running since 2007. HMIs without modern auth. Air-gapped networks that aren't actually air-gapped. Industrial protocols nobody on a generic IT team has seen. We know how to secure these environments without forcing a forklift upgrade — because most of the time, a forklift upgrade isn't on the table.
We design controls that don't break the line.
A control that locks operators out at 3 AM is a control that gets bypassed at 3:01 AM. Every change to the production environment is reviewed against operational impact before it ships. We work with your maintenance team, your operators, and your supervisors — not just the office. Compliance that breaks the line doesn't last a week.
We've answered the questionnaire from your biggest customer's auditor.
When the Tier-1 customer's procurement team sends 40 pages, we've seen most of them before. We know what answers earn the engagement, what answers buy a follow-up call, and which lines need to be true before you sign anything. We're who you bring to that call — not who you call after it goes badly.
The questions manufacturing leaders actually ask us.
Bring better questions to the readiness call and we'll go further. These are the starters.
Do we really need to segment OT from IT?+
What's the realistic threat from China — or other state actors?+
Our PLC is from 2007 and the vendor is gone. What do we do?+
We're not selling to DoD. Do we need CMMC?+
A peer manufacturer was ransomware'd. How worried should we be?+
What does this actually cost?+
Three ways in. Pick what fits.
No qualifying call before the qualifying call. Each path is real, each one's free or fixed-fee, each ends with you having a better answer than you walked in with.
Manufacturing readiness call.
Bring your customer's questionnaire, your insurance renewal, your IT vendor's last assessment, your sleepless-night question. We'll tell you where the real gaps are between what you have and what your biggest customer's auditor expects to see — and roughly what it'll cost to close them.
Schedule the call →Take the AI Readiness Scorecard.
AI is showing up in vision systems, predictive maintenance, and production planning faster than most plants are tracking. Twelve questions, a real grade, no email gate. Useful as a first read before your IT team or a vendor convinces you you're further along than you are.
Start the Scorecard →Read about the Exposure Report.
Same engagement style we'd run for a customer audit pre-assessment, applied to AI exposure. Worth a look if you want to see how we run paid diagnostics — and to gauge fit before the call.
See deliverables →