How do you plan for recovery when the system you’re trying to protect can’t be shut down—and won’t wait for IT’s playbook? In this episode, Tobias Halmans, an incident responder at admeritia in Germany, shares how disaster recovery and business continuity must be rethought when applied to operational technology (OT) environments.
⬥GUEST⬥
Tobias Halmans, OT Incident Responder | GIAC Certified Incident Handler | Automation Security Consultant at admeritia GmbH | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-halmans/
⬥HOST⬥
Host: Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imsmartin/ | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com
⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥
Business continuity planning is a familiar exercise for most IT and security leaders—but when you move into operational technology (OT), the rules change. In this episode of Redefining CyberSecurity, Sean Martin talks with Tobias Halmans, an incident responder at admeritia, who helps organizations prepare for and respond to incidents in OT environments. Tobias shares why disaster recovery planning in OT requires more than simply adapting IT frameworks. It demands a change in approach, mindset, and communication.
OT engineers don’t think in terms of “ransomware readiness.” They think in terms of safety, uptime, manual fallback options, and how long a plant can stay operational without a SCADA system. As Tobias explains, while IT teams worry about backup integrity and rapid rebooting, OT teams are focused on whether shutting down a system—even safely—is even an option. And when the recovery plan depends on third-party vendors, the assumptions made on both sides can derail the response before it begins.
Tobias walks us through the nuances of defining success in OT recovery. Unlike the IT world’s metrics like mean time to recover (MTTR), OT environments often hinge on production impacts and safety thresholds. Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) still exist—but they must be anchored in real-world plant operations, often shaped by vendor limitations, legacy constraints, and tightly regulated safety requirements.
Perhaps most importantly, Tobias stresses that business continuity planning for OT can’t just be a cybersecurity add-on. It must be part of broader risk and operational conversations, ideally happening when systems are being designed or upgraded. But in reality, many organizations are only starting these conversations now—often driven more by compliance mandates than proactive risk strategy.
Whether you’re a CISO trying to bridge the gap with your OT counterparts or an engineer wondering why cyber teams keep showing up with playbooks that don’t fit, this conversation offers grounded, real-world insight into what preparedness really means for critical operations.
⬥SPONSORS⬥
LevelBlue: https://itspm.ag/attcybersecurity-3jdk3
ThreatLocker: https://itspm.ag/threatlocker-r974
⬥RESOURCES⬥
Inspiring Article: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-fluchs_notfallvorsorge-in-der-ot-traut-euch-activity-7308744270453092352-Q8X1
⬥ADDITIONAL INFORMATION⬥
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