Strengthening critical infrastructure through continuous monitoring

Today’s critical infrastructure operates across an increasingly vast, complex and connected landscape, from dense urban centres to the most remote, isolated outposts. While these environments differ dramatically in scale and function, they all share a common challenge: maintaining confidence that every system, asset and connection is working as it should. Of course, physical threats to critical infrastructure often remain the most pressing concern; subsea internet cables can be severed by anchors or sabotage and energy networks are often disrupted by extreme weather. Yet as these environments become more digitally integrated – and as AI-driven threats grow in sophistication – physical resilience alone is no longer enough.

To ensure continuity, physical safeguards must be complemented by constant monitoring and assurance across the digital environment.

From energy grids to water treatment facilities, many critical environments face similar gaps that can leave them vulnerable to both physical attacks and cyber disruption. Of course, these are not forgotten systems – far from it. They’re just inherently more complex. But in an era where systems are becoming more digitally integrated and connected, complexity quickly becomes a bad actor’s best friend.

A growing operational blind spot

Redundancy and operational fail-safes have long been the backbone of critical infrastructure resilience. Energy grids, ports and even air traffic control systems are designed with backups to keep services running when something goes wrong. But redundancy only addresses part of the challenge, particularly in the face of modern digital risks. If backup systems are outdated or unmonitored, they carry the same weaknesses as the primary, and attackers only need one opening. Recent events highlight this tension, such as the UK’s National Air Traffic Services suffering a major systems outage, forcing flights across the country to be suspended. Backup systems triggered as designed, but instead of ensuring continuity, they only heightened the failure. A reminder that redundancy alone cannot guarantee resilience in complex digital environments.

Subsea cable landing stations, for example, underscore this challenge clearly. Remote and physically exposed, they’re designed with redundancy to keep internet traffic flowing. But

alongside risks from anchors or sabotage, these facilities also depend on legacy control systems, niche vendors and remote management systems that are harder to monitor. If a physical incident occurs and digital systems are outdated or compromised, operators can lose visibility just when they need it most. This can open up risks for an increase in cyber incidents, which would only exacerbate the problem.

And this challenge isn’t unique to subsea facilities. In many other critical sectors, visibility is also constrained by design. Network segmentation has, therefore, become a practical necessity, from hospitals isolating life-critical medical devices to utilities separating OT from IT. But segmentation, especially when layered on top of legacy systems, creates complexity that obscures visibility. And as IT and OT continue to converge, the traditional “air gap” once seen as a safeguard is dissolving. Without continuous oversight into how these systems behave and connect, blind spots remain – proving that isolation alone is no longer enough to guarantee resilience.

What’s needed is a way to continuously monitor and manage risk across both the physical and digital layers, ensuring resilience is never left to chance.

Applying exposure management

The answer lies in being able to continuously understand and manage risk in real time, without relying on downtime or reactive patching. For critical infrastructure, this means moving beyond assumptions of isolation or redundancy, and instead developing a clear, ongoing picture of the entire operational environment.

Continuous monitoring provides operators with the assurance that every link in the chain is functioning as intended, even when those systems are remote or inaccessible. Crucially, this oversight is not about more manual work. Powered by automation and AI, it works in the background to surface the insights that matter most, allowing teams to focus on the bigger operational challenges in front of them.

Cyber exposure management provides the framework to make this possible. At its core, exposure management is about identifying, assessing, prioritising and reducing cyber risk across an organisation’s digital footprint. It begins with visibility: seeing every asset, whether managed or unmanaged, IT or OT, cloud-based or on-premises. But when combined with contextual intelligence – understanding what each asset does, how critical it is, how it behaves under normal conditions and what it connects to – teams can then make sense of complex environments and eliminate blind spots.

By embedding monitoring into day-to-day operations, organisations don’t just reduce cyber risk, they strengthen the reliability of the entire system, physical and digital. Put simply, exposure management gives operators back control by shining a light on every asset and connection, and making sure security efforts bolster, not hinder, operations.

From obscurity to operational priority

Physical resilience will always remain the first line of defence for critical infrastructure. Safeguards like redundancy, fail-safes and physical protections are essential, and rightly the primary focus for operators. But in a world where infrastructure is increasingly digital and interconnected, physical resilience alone cannot guarantee continuity.

This is where continuous monitoring through exposure management comes in. Powered by automation and AI, it works in the background to give operators the digital assurance that every asset and connection is functioning as it should – complementing physical safeguards rather than competing with them.

By bringing the entire digital ecosystem into clear view, exposure management provides the context, intelligence and confidence that systems are secure, resilient and ready to be used as intended.