Zero Networks OT customer base rises 80% amid demand

Zero Networks has recorded rapid growth in adoption of its OT microsegmentation products among industrial enterprises, with its OT customer base up 80% year on year.

The increase includes multiple manufacturers ranked among the world's top 20, alongside customers in energy, utilities and transportation. OT environments now feature in 26% of net new deals, while 37% of customers first deployed the company's tools in IT before extending them into OT.

Operational technology, or OT, covers the systems that monitor and control industrial processes, from factory machinery to energy and transport infrastructure. Security controls in these environments have long been harder to deploy than in office IT systems because operators are wary of disrupting production, and many sites still run legacy equipment.

The update reflects a wider push by industrial groups to tighten controls between IT and OT networks as cyber attacks on critical operations come under greater scrutiny from boards and regulators. Manufacturers, utilities and transport operators face growing pressure to stop intruders moving across networks after an initial breach.

That pressure has increased after a series of attacks on industrial and transport organisations forced operations offline or into manual mode. In manufacturing, ransomware incidents have shown how quickly disruption can spread across multiple plants, while attacks on energy and water systems have highlighted risks to essential services.

Industrial demand

Customers deploying Zero Networks' OT products run an average of six sites or plants per installation. That suggests organisations are not limiting segmentation projects to single trial locations, but extending them across broader industrial estates.

The figures also point to a closer link between conventional enterprise security and plant-floor protection. As more industrial groups connect production systems with central business applications, they face a larger attack surface and a greater risk that a breach in one environment could affect the other.

For operators of critical infrastructure and major industrial sites, the issue is not only data theft. A successful intrusion can halt production, interrupt supplies, create safety problems and trigger financial losses from downtime.

European regulation has added another layer of urgency. The NIS2 framework has increased focus on resilience, incident reporting, supply chain security and management accountability across critical sectors, pushing many organisations to show they can contain and recover from cyber incidents as well as detect them.

In practice, that has increased interest in network segmentation and least-privilege access controls, which aim to restrict unnecessary connections between systems. Advocates argue these measures can reduce the scope of an attack if one device or account is compromised.

Shift in approach

Traditional segmentation in industrial networks has often been viewed as slow and operationally risky because of the manual work involved in mapping systems and maintaining rules. As a result, many operators still allow broad internal access across plants and connected enterprise networks, even where perimeter security has improved.

Zero Networks is positioning its offering around microsegmentation, a model that applies tighter controls at the level of individual devices, applications or identities. The approach is designed to limit lateral movement by attackers inside an organisation after they gain an initial foothold.

Benny Lakunishok, chief executive officer and co-founder of Zero Networks, described the problem in blunt terms. "Most industrial organizations haven't implemented meaningful OT segmentation at all-not because they don't see the risk, but because traditional approaches have been too complex and disruptive," he said.

He said customers were looking for ways to contain threats without interfering with industrial operations. "Organisations need a simple, safe way to contain threats without impacting operations. That's why leading enterprises are turning to Zero Networks to bring microsegmentation into OT environments-quickly reducing risk without disrupting production," Lakunishok said.

The company's customer data suggests OT is becoming a larger part of buying decisions rather than a niche add-on. With more than a quarter of new deals now involving OT, suppliers serving industrial groups are likely to face stronger demand for products that work across both enterprise and operational networks.

That shift matters because many industrial cyber security projects have historically focused on monitoring and detection rather than containment. The latest uptake figures indicate more operators now want to restrict how far an attack can spread inside factories, plants and transport systems.

Across the sector, the debate is shifting from whether to segment industrial networks to how quickly organisations can do it without affecting uptime. Zero Networks' OT deployments now span manufacturing, energy, utilities and transportation.