Manufacturing
Zero Trust for IT and OT, Without Slowing the Floor
- 01
Request
- 02
Policy check
- 03
Approved path
01
Requirements reviewed with your team
02
Technical fit and integrations assessed
03
Pilot scope defined around measurable outcomes
How access actually reaches the plant floor
The line does not stop. That single constraint explains most of what looks strange about manufacturing security from the outside. You cannot patch during production, you cannot reboot a controller to test a change, and a maintenance window is negotiated weeks ahead against an output target.
Around that sit two populations with standing access. Equipment builders support the machines they sold, usually through a cellular modem they installed or a VPN account nobody reviews. Suppliers and logistics partners exchange forecasts, drawings, and schedules through a portal or, more often, a site-to-site tunnel built for one project in 2018 that still carries traffic.
Both were granted at the network layer because that was the available tool. The result is that a machine builder's support laptop and a supplier's ERP integration are both, at layer 3, closer to the historian and the MES than anyone intended. When ransomware crosses from IT to OT, that adjacency is the bridge.
Where manufacturing is actually exposed
Five failure modes specific to this environment, not a restatement of general security advice.
01
OEM remote support paths
Equipment vendors need to reach the machines they support, and often installed their own connectivity to do it, sometimes a cellular modem the network team never inventoried. Each one is a path into the plant governed by a service contract rather than by your access policy.
02
Supplier and partner tunnels that outlive their project
A site-to-site tunnel built for one integration keeps carrying traffic long after the project ends, because nobody can be certain what breaks if it is removed. Reach is defined by a routing decision made years ago rather than by any current commercial relationship.
03
Flat OT networks that cannot be re-architected quickly
Controllers, HMIs, and historians frequently sit on shared segments with minimal internal separation, running software that cannot be patched on a security timeline. You cannot redesign the network without production downtime, so segmentation has to arrive at the access path instead.
04
Engineering IP in AI tools
An engineer pastes a process recipe, a tolerance table, or a section of supplier pricing into a chatbot to reformat or explain it. That is the actual competitive asset of the business, now sitting in a vendor's logs. No control on the network saw anything unusual leave.
05
Files arriving from the supply chain
CAD files, quality documents, and purchase orders arrive continuously from hundreds of suppliers of wildly varying security maturity. Attachment-borne compromise into a plant environment is a well-worn route precisely because those files have to be opened to do the job.
Who this page is for
- Plant IT and OT engineering
- Answers for uptime first, and will reject any control that risks the line to satisfy a policy.
- CISO / Group security
- Owns the IT-to-OT crossover risk and the third-party access nobody has a full inventory of.
- Maintenance and reliability
- Depends on OEM support arriving fast when a machine is down, and will route around anything that delays it.
- Supply chain and procurement
- Manages partner connectivity that was set up as a technical favour and became permanent infrastructure.
- Engineering and R and D
- Holds the process knowledge that is the actual asset, and is already using AI tools to move faster.
How a team would actually run this
Replacing an OEM tunnel with per-machine access
- 01 Inventory what the vendor actually reaches today. This step alone usually changes the conversation, because the answer is normally broader than the contract.
- 02 Publish the specific machine interfaces and the vendor's own console as named resources behind MaskFlare Access, without touching the controllers themselves.
- 03 Bind access to the vendor's identity and a support window, with a session approval step where the machine is safety-critical.
- 04 Cut the old path only after a real support event has run through the new one. A vendor blocked during a line-down event is the failure mode that ends the program.
Giving a supplier one system instead of a tunnel
- 01 Identify the single application the partner genuinely needs, which is usually a portal, a forecast view, or a drawing repository rather than the network it sits on.
- 02 Publish it individually and scope access to the partner's identity group for the term of the commercial relationship.
- 03 Where drawings are sensitive, deliver through an isolated browser session so files are viewed without being downloaded to a device you do not control.
- 04 Retire the tunnel. Partner access is now a list you can produce during a customer audit, which is increasingly what customers ask for.
Keeping process IP out of external AI tools
- 01 Route approved AI tools through Vault so prompts are inspected before they leave the network.
- 02 Define what counts as sensitive in your context. Part numbers, tolerances, supplier names, and pricing are the specifics worth naming, because a generic PII policy will not catch any of them.
- 03 Redact or block according to that policy, and make the block message explain itself, since an engineer who does not understand a block will find another route within a day.
- 04 Keep the record. If a customer or an insurer asks how engineering data is controlled, this is the artifact.
Which modules apply, and why
Each links to the module page, where the boundaries and development status are set out in full. Or start at the MaskFlare platform overview.
Zero Trust & SASE
MaskFlare Access
Publishes machine interfaces, MES, and partner-facing systems individually, so OEM and supplier reach is a policy rather than a routing decision.
Zero Trust & SASE
MaskFlare Sandbox
Detonates CAD files, quality documents, and purchase orders arriving from suppliers before they open on a plant workstation.
Zero Trust & SASE
MaskFlare Vault
Detects and redacts engineering IP, process parameters, and supplier pricing before a prompt reaches an external AI tool.
Zero Trust & SASE
MaskFlare Shield
Applies one egress inspection policy across plants, offices, and remote engineers instead of an appliance stack per site.
Regulatory context
Readiness and relevance, not certification. Nothing here is a claim to hold an audit or authorization we do not have.
- IEC 62443
- The zones and conduits model in this standard is close to what per-application access implements. Useful shared vocabulary when security has to explain a change to OT engineering.
- NIS2 (EU)
- Brings many manufacturers into scope for incident reporting and supply chain security obligations. Third-party access control is directly relevant, though MaskFlare is a control rather than a compliance program.
- CMMC and defense supply chain
- Defense suppliers face access control and audit requirements beyond commercial norms. MaskFlare holds no CMMC assessment or authorization, so raise this early if it applies to you.
- Customer security audits
- In practice the most frequent driver here is not a regulator but a large customer's security questionnaire. Per-application access changes what you can answer about third-party reach.
What MaskFlare does not do
- MaskFlare is pre-launch. Capabilities here are in development, and any plant pilot should start on a non-production system.
- No manufacturing customers to name and no uptime figures to quote.
- MaskFlare does not do OT asset discovery, protocol-aware industrial firewalling, PLC configuration monitoring, or safety system integration. Those need dedicated OT security tooling and MaskFlare sits alongside it.
- We would not recommend placing MaskFlare inline with a safety-instrumented system. Access control belongs on the support and management path, not in a safety loop.
Four questions to ask any vendor here
Including us. If our answer is worse than someone else's, you should know that before a pilot, not during one.
- 01What happens to production if this control fails? Ask for the failure mode explicitly, and treat vagueness as a no.
- 02Can an OEM be given access to four machines rather than the segment they sit on, without modifying the controllers?
- 03Does the AI data policy understand our sensitive data, meaning part numbers and process parameters, or only names and card numbers?
- 04How is this deployed at a plant with no local IT staff and a maintenance window measured in hours per quarter?
Workflow guides for this industry
How a team applies each of these, including the contrast with the tool it replaces.
Definitions worth agreeing on first
Manufacturing questions we get asked
What happens to the line if MaskFlare goes down?
This is the right first question and it should be answered explicitly during scoping rather than assumed. MaskFlare governs the remote access and management path, not machine-to-machine control traffic on the floor, and we would not recommend deploying it inline with a safety-instrumented system. Any pilot should start on a non-production system.
Can we scope an equipment vendor to specific machines?
Yes, and it does not require changing the controllers. The machine interfaces and the vendor's console are published as named resources, and access is bound to the vendor's identity and a support window. The practical work is usually inventorying what that vendor reaches today, which is often broader than the contract describes.
Do we have to re-architect the OT network first?
No, and that is the point. Network re-architecture needs production downtime you do not have. Per-application access changes what a given identity can reach without changing the underlying segment, so it is deployable inside a maintenance reality rather than instead of one.
How does this protect CAD files and process IP?
Two paths. Inbound supplier files can be detonated in a sandbox before they open on a plant workstation. Outbound, Vault inspects prompts to external AI tools and redacts or blocks based on a policy you define, which has to include part numbers, tolerances, and pricing, because a default PII policy will not recognize any of them as sensitive.
Is MaskFlare CMMC assessed?
No. We hold no CMMC assessment or authorization. If you supply the defense industrial base and that requirement applies to your flow-down, raise it in the first conversation so neither side spends time on a procurement that cannot complete.
How does this work at a plant with no local IT staff?
The connector model is designed so that publishing an application does not require an on-site engineer per change, but plant realities vary widely and we would rather examine yours than promise a deployment shape that does not survive contact with the site.
Early customer program
We're looking for manufacturing teams with a specific exposure from the list above and a willingness to scope a pilot around one measurable outcome. Bring the constraint that makes it hard, because that is the part worth talking about.
Your next chapter starts here
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