Cyberattacks against manufacturing companies have increased in recent years. Attackers are increasingly targeting suppliers, subcontractors and production chains, where sensitive information, technical drawings and business-critical data are stored.
Industrial companies have become attractive targets because they handle both intellectual property and business-critical production processes. For companies in the electronics and semiconductor industries, a data breach can carry risks tied to product development, intellectual property and trade secrets. Several security experts have pointed out in recent years that supply chains represent one of the most vulnerable parts of the global tech sector.
OT and IT Are Converging, and That Widens the Attack Surface
A large part of the risk in manufacturing comes from OT environments, meaning control systems, machinery and other production equipment, being increasingly connected to the IT network. Historically, OT systems have often been isolated and built for uptime rather than security, with long lifecycles and software that is rarely patched. As they become linked to office networks, cloud services and supplier connections, new entry points open up, entry points that aren't always built to withstand a targeted attack.
That means an attack that starts in a supplier's IT environment can, in the worst case, spread onward into a customer's production equipment, or the other way around.
The Consequences Go Beyond Data Loss
The current incident underscores the growing importance of cybersecurity across the global manufacturing industry. As more production environments become digitalized and interconnected, the need to protect both IT systems and sensitive product information grows with it.
For a manufacturing company, the consequences of a breach can look very different depending on where in the chain it hits. Stolen design data and technical drawings can erode a company's competitive edge for a long time. An attack that reaches production-adjacent systems can lead to downtime, delays across the supply chain, and costs that go far beyond the security incident itself. And when a subcontractor is the one affected, it's often the end customer's brand and customer relationships that take the hit, even if their own company was never directly attacked.
Where Acronis Fits In
What makes this interesting is that Acronis has a solution built specifically for OT environments, not just IT. Acronis Cyber Protect for OT is designed to keep production systems like control systems, HMI and SCADA running, even in air-gapped environments with no external network connection for security reasons. It also works on older Windows and Linux versions that many other vendors have dropped support for, exactly the kind of legacy operating systems that tend to stick around in production long after they've disappeared from the office.
With One-Click Recovery, staff with no IT background can restore a failed OT system on-site in minutes instead of the hours or days a production outage would otherwise cost. The same agent that handles backup also delivers EDR, antivirus and ransomware protection, and backups can be scanned for malware before a restore, so a company doesn't accidentally recover straight back into an infected environment.
The solution is built around the Purdue Reference Model and protects both the production-level layers (control systems and operations) and the standard IT systems at the office and enterprise level, which makes it relevant across the whole chain, from the factory floor to administrative systems like ERP, procurement and quality control. It also helps companies meet requirements like IEC 62443 and NIS2, which is especially relevant given how much regulatory pressure is building for industry and critical infrastructure right now.
The solution is already used by major industrial players like ABB, Schneider Electric, Tata Steel and Toyota, which says something about how concrete the need is in this sector.
For an MSP that wants to talk credibly about supply chain risk with manufacturing clients, that's a concrete starting point: not just pointing at the problem, but showing a solution that's actually built for the environment the client works in.
Are you interested to get to know more about how this works for your clients' supply chains, including their OT environments, with Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud? Reach out to us at sales@gridheart.com