Smart Industry Must Shine a Brighter Light in Network Darkness

From RFID readers to conveyors, sensors, and even robots, everything is connected and communicating across today’s industrial networks. Data flows freely, decisions happen at machine speed, and IT and OT are converging (whether teams want to or not). After years of anticipation, Industry 4.0 is finally here, transforming the factory floor with it.

But accelerated digitization can come at a cost. Siloed operations, fragmented tools, and incompatible protocols create dangerous network blind spots. And it’s in these visibility gaps that bad actors operate. Ransomware attacks against the industrial sector surged about 50% quarter-over-quarter in 2025 because attackers know operations are only as reliable as the infrastructure supporting them.

Heading into the new year, companies must shine a brighter light in network darkness. By making visibility the new perimeter and predicting problems before they cascade, smart industry can take full advantage of this evolution without risking breaches or shutdowns.

What’s Happening On The Factory Floor

Take a look around modern manufacturing or logistics operations and you’ll see big differences compared to yesteryear— RFID tags tracking every pallet through automated sorting systems, IoT sensors monitoring industrial vital signs like temperature and conveyor speed, and edge gateways processing data locally before sending summaries to the cloud. Even PLCs from the 1990s, still managing critical production lines, communicate with machine learning to predict maintenance needs. As I wrote in October, Industry 4.0 is well and truly alive, and the pace of adoption is set to grow by 20% each year over the next decade.

Perhaps teething pains in this context aren’t surprising. Previously, IT focused on data security and network performance, while OT handled operational continuity and production efficiency. But this cultural divide is dissolving by the day. Operational systems designed for isolation now connect to the wider enterprise, blurring the lines between teams and who oversees what. Further, delivering a steady stream of secure information to meet the demands of big data is no mean feat, and disparate cultures overseeing dispersed architectures only make the job harder.

You Can’t Secure What You Can’t See

Blind spots are far too common in this new network paradigm. When RFID readers or PLCs behave abnormally, IT sometimes struggles to understand why. Likewise, in the event of unauthorized connections and data exfiltration attempts, OT often lacks the detection know-how.

The network darkness in between is a boon for bad actors with more powerful tools. They’re using automated vulnerability scanning to identify weak assets, probe the network, and move laterally to high-value targets. Ransomware is the attack of choice as industrial uptime is the lifeblood of operations – would-be hackers know these sectors are more likely to pay up to avoid production pauses.

There’s a clear financial incentive and companies must remove the target from their backs. Those that make visibility the new perimeter enjoy a dual benefit in Industry 4.0— simultaneous better defense and newfound efficiency.

Getting Network Visibility and Monitoring Right

We’re in a new era and always-on networks demand more intelligent oversight. The good news is this is possible with continuous monitoring; platforms that watch IT and OT 24/7 and interpret what’s happening across assets in real time. Instead of checking devices periodically or reacting after problems occur, these systems provide around-the-clock performance and security metrics.

With continuous, standardized observability that breaks down silos, there’s less finger-pointing and more problem-solving. Likewise, monitoring that provides a single pane of glass – rather than several tools with separate dashboards – translates legacy industrial protocols to bridge the old and the new.

Fighting Fatigue

This matters when it comes to alert fatigue. Notification monitoring often raises false positives or fails to classify severity, leading to increased admin burnout. Automated anomaly detection, on the other hand, learns what’s normal and only surfaces real problems – a one-two punch that reduces complexity and flags issues ahead of time.

This kind of visibility is essential across sectors. In logistics, it keeps tracking systems operational, avoiding inventory losses and misrouted goods. In regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, companies can guarantee traceability and compliance. And in manufacturing, more proactive monitoring ensures RFID-enabled automation runs smoothly, preventing costly downtime. This is something we saw recently with Paessler joining the Siemens Industrial Edge Ecosystem— bringing unified IT/OT monitoring directly to the shop floor where manufacturers can detect and resolve issues such as sensor drift or network failures in real time, achieving 25% faster root cause identification.

The choice is clear heading into 2026: ignore the threat of fragmented oversight and hope for the best, or move with the moment and illuminate every corner of the network. The companies shining a brighter light will be the ones that thrive.