Turning Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle into Actionable OT Risk Management

According to the updated Hype Cycle for Cyber-Physical Systems Security that was released in July 2025, CPS Risk Management sits at the Emerging maturity level and is identified as a necessity in critical environments.

Gartner states that “CPS Risk Management ensures that the unique security and safety risks of CPS are effectively managed.” It explains that CPS – whether they stem from IT/OT connectivity, IoT, IIoT, or smart ‘X’ programs – “connect the cyber and physical worlds,” thereby greatly enlarging the attack surface and consequences for organizations. “As a result, they require special focus when it comes to risk management.”

What’s Driving Early Adoption

1. Insurance & Regulatory Mandates: Underwriters now insist on demonstrable CPS controls before issuing or renewing policies.
   
2. Threat Migration: Adversaries are moving beyond IT into OT networks, where breaches have immediate physical and operational impact.
   
3. Expanded Vulnerabilities: Disclosures of flaws in real-time operating systems and control firmware continue to broaden the CPS attack surface.
4. CPS Skills Shortage: Gartner emphasizes that CPS-security expertise—understanding industrial assets, protocols and safety processes—is even rarer than general cybersecurity talent, making automation essential.
5. Generative AI’s Dual Role: The report highlights that generative AI will be wielded by both defenders and attackers, raising the stakes for AI-aware CPS defences.

Gartner’s Must-Have Capabilities

To address these pressures, effective CPS risk-quantification platforms must:

• Discover Every Asset and establish its risk profile.
• Continuously Update Risk Registries, prioritizing assets whose compromise carries the greatest safety or operational impact.
• Map Controls to Standards (IEC 62443, NIST CSF) and identify critical gaps.
• Enable Cross-Team Collaboration among IT, OT, and safety stakeholders.

A Specialized Vendor Landscape

Gartner lists only four Sample Vendors for CPS cyber-risk quantification—aizoOn, DeNexus, Radiflow, and SecurityGate.io—underscoring how nascent and specialized this market remains. Radiflow stands apart as the only vendor purpose-built for OT/ICS environments, automating the full CPS risk-assessment lifecycle:

1. Digital Image Creation: Passively collects telemetry from industrial control networks to build a unified Digital Image of all ICS assets, protocols, and communication paths.
2. Quantified Risk Scoring: Calculates risk scores that factor in real-world threat exposure alongside asset criticality—highlighting which vulnerabilities pose the highest operational or safety risk.
3. Standards-Aligned Insights: Auto-maps findings to IEC 62443, NIST CSF, and other best practices controls, producing audit-ready evidence, customized reports, and virtual Breach Attack Simulations.
4. Ongoing Risk Management: Provides posture updates for assessment deviations, newly discovered vulnerabilities, and emerging threat indicators – enabling lean teams to maintain accurate oversight despite a CPS skills gap
5. Native Integration of Detection and Risk Management (“Radiflow One”): Integration between Radiflow’s OT Intrusion and Anomaly Detection and CIARA OT Risk Management enables risk-aware alert prioritization to focus analyst attention on the most critical events.

This OT-specialized automation empowers organizations to do more with less—collecting richer, more accurate data and deriving deeper insights while significantly reducing time, headcount, and reliance on scarce CPS-security expertise.

Conclusion

Gartner’s Hype Cycles make clear that CPS risk-quantification is no longer optional for any critical-infrastructure operator. With the global information-security market approaching USD 201 billion, a growing cybersecurity skills shortage, and the rise of AI-driven threats and nation-state campaigns, only a purpose-built, automated OT platform can deliver day-one risk reduction. Radiflow turns these strategic insights into practical, continuous protection—safeguarding both your digital and physical operations with maximum efficiency.