OULU, Finland / IRVING, Texas, May 20, 2026 — Tosi's 2026 State of OT Security Report reveals a surprising finding: manufacturing is the only industry in the study in which U.S. companies trail their European counterparts in OT security maturity, scoring 31.2 versus 34.7 on a 50-point scale.
The gap is driven almost entirely by remote access, the weakest capability in any region across the entire study, where U.S. organizations score just 4.7 compared to 6.7 in Europe. According to the report, U.S. manufacturing respondents still rely on open ports or shared VPN credentials to provide remote OT access, leaving their systems vulnerable. Published ahead of the recent intensification of cyberattacks on American critical infrastructure, the report serves as a practical roadmap, one that, if implemented earlier, could have helped manufacturers avoid operational, financial and reputational damage.
“The data tells a clear story: the gap in U.S. manufacturing OT security is not a tools gap; it is a process and enforcement gap” said Sakari Suhonen, CEO of Tosi U.S. “Most organizations have technology in place. What is missing is operational ownership. Someone needs to be responsible for who gets into the plant floor, when, and for how long. That accountability has to sit in operations' hands, backed by tools purpose-built for OT environments, not repurposed from IT. The latest cyberattacks and federal advisory confirmed what our research already showed. The door was open. The question now is whether manufacturers will close it before the next incident does it for them.”
The report also reveals that U.S. manufacturing organizations manage internal OT traffic reasonably well but struggle at the boundary between IT and OT networks, the point where corporate systems meet the plant floor. That boundary is where the exposure lives. To make matters worse, the ability to revoke or remove vendor access also scores low, meaning that even organizations with some form of vendor access controls in place cannot cleanly enforce them. The tools to fix this exist. The gap is not technological, it is operational.
Beyond remote access, the report assessed four other capability areas. European companies outperform their American counterparts across all of them, with one exception: asset visibility, where the scores are virtually identical:
- Threat detection is the strongest capability globally at 7.3 out of 10 (6.7 in the U.S. and 7.5 in Europe), indicating that manufacturers have invested in monitoring and anomaly detection more than in other areas.
- Network segmentation scores 7.0 globally (6.8 in the U.S. and 6.9 in Europe), meaning most manufacturers have established some boundary between IT and OT environments. However, enforcement and east-west traffic controls inside the OT environment remain less mature globally.
- Asset visibility is the relative gap in Europe at 6.7 out of 10 (6.8 in the U.S., 6.8 globally). While asset tracking tools are in use, many organizations still rely on periodic rather than automated discovery, leaving gaps in real-time inventory coverage.
- Multi-site deployment scores 6.2 in the U.S. (6.9 in Europe, 6.7 globally), the lowest regional score in this category. Deploying secure connectivity to new facilities and maintaining unified visibility across sites remains a persistent operational challenge.
About the 2026 State of OT Security Report
Primary research conducted in February 2026 by an independent firm with 77 security and operations professionals at U.S. enterprises exceeding $1 billion in annual revenue across water and wastewater, energy, manufacturing, financial services, retail and real estate. The full global study includes 135 respondents across the U.S., UK/Ireland, Germany, Benelux and Finland. Of these, 24 responses came from the manufacturing industry.
Each one of the five capabilities was assessed using two questions, scored on a 1-to-5 scale, with a maximum of 10 points per section and 50 points overall. Higher scores reflect greater maturity and operational depth. The full overview of the U.S. part of the report containing a detailed description of scores per capability is available here.
About Tosi
Tosi (formerly Tosibox) is the global pioneer in Cyber Physical Systems platforms for OT networks. Since 2011, the company has deployed solutions to connect, visualize and control hundreds of thousands of industrial devices. With headquarters in Irving, Texas and Oulu, Finland, Tosi serves 800+ customers globally and operates with 150+ partners. The company's integrated platform enables rapid deployment, comprehensive visibility and unified control that delivers OT security that scales.
