Australian utilities face two pressures on IT/OT. They need to bring information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) together to make better operational decisions. At the same time, the SOCI Act and the ASD’s CI Fortify guidance ask them to control those connections and keep critical services running if systems are isolated.
The answer is to design and govern information flows around the decisions that matter most. Every connection needs a clear purpose and controls, and it must be able to be shut off.
For many utilities, answering these questions confidently is harder than it should be because the answers span two worlds. Part of it is in operational technology (OT), such as SCADA, telemetry, control systems and historians. Part of it is in information technology (IT), such as asset management, maintenance, planning and finance. A confident answer depends on bringing that information together.
Resilience expectations are pushing in the other direction. Australian and allied cyber agencies warn that state-sponsored actors are targeting critical infrastructure, positioning themselves to disrupt essential services in a crisis or conflict. In Australia, strengthened risk management rules under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act and the CI Fortify guidance are asking operators to control how IT and OT connect and to keep critical services running through serious disruption.
Both pressures are legitimate. When utilities treat them as competing agendas rather than one design problem, they often end up with connections that are hard to justify and hard to secure, along with boundaries that frustrate the people running the network.
The usual question is whether to connect IT and OT or keep them apart. A more useful question is this:
How do we make the right operational information available to support important decisions while preserving the boundaries, controls and resilience that genuinely matter?
Our answer:
Design and govern information flows around the decisions that matter most, so that utilities gain better insight without weakening the resilience their operations depend on.
In practice, that means three things:
The case for bringing IT and OT information together should start with the decisions it improves. “We need to connect IT and OT” is a technology statement. “We need to answer these decisions with confidence” is an operational one, and it’s a much better basis for deciding what should flow and why.
Take the headroom question again. A useful answer combines real-time operating data with asset condition, planned maintenance, known constraints and demand forecasts. The same pattern appears across other utility operations:
Experience suggests a simple discipline: ask what data is needed and who needs it, and resist the urge to ask for everything. Starting with decisions keeps the scope honest. It also gives every proposed connection a reason to exist.
It’s worth asking:
Every flow between IT and OT should exist for a reason and be designed for that reason.
Better information doesn’t automatically justify more connectivity.
The value of a flow has to be weighed against what it exposes, and the same insight can often be delivered in a less exposed way. For most utilities, this starts with finding the flows that already exist, including vendor remote access and shared services, before designing new ones.
OT environments manage physical processes like treatment, pumping, distribution, and power. When these systems fail or are interfered with, the consequences are serious. This can lead to service disruptions, environmental damage, or safety risks. Risk can also move between environments: if an IT system, such as a dashboard environment, is compromised, attackers can use it to reach the operational systems it connects to, and vice versa. Threat researchers have observed attackers establishing access inside industrial systems, sometimes months before acting.
The wider debate can look polarised. Some practitioners argue the air gap is no longer the gold standard, while resilience guidance emphasises the ability to isolate. Both, however, reject unmanaged connection, and what matters is whether each flow is intentional.
An intentional flow has three qualities:
The information you’d need most in a crisis should still be available when systems are disconnected.
It’s worth asking:
Decisions about what information crosses between IT and OT, and how, need explicit owners and a shared forum, because no single team holds the whole picture. Getting these flows right is rarely a technology problem alone.
One regional water utility in Queensland illustrates this. Its IT team was confident it had a clear view of its technology assets, but that view covered servers. The treatment team owned the PLCs, RTUs and field instruments at the treatment plants, but they weren’t part of the conversation. What was missing was a connection between people and accountabilities.
The decisions here cross boundaries: what to connect, what to protect, what value is worth what risk, and what must keep working during a disruption. Operations, OT, IT, cyber, data and architecture teams each hold part of the picture.
When these decisions are made within one team, they reflect that team’s priorities. When nobody owns them, they’re made by default.
OT teams rightly prioritise robustness and safety. IT teams are often measured on responsiveness and cost. Neither view is wrong, but they lead to different instincts about what to connect. Finding common ground between them matters as much as any technical design.
A practical starting point is to ask each group what information it needs and how quickly it needs it. A control room operator, a planner and an executive in an incident room have very different tolerances for delay. Those tolerances help set where boundaries should sit, and they turn a cultural difference into a design discussion.
Effective governance doesn’t have to be complicated. It simply requires clear decision rights for trade-offs, a common understanding of which decisions and systems are vital, and a forum where operational, cyber, and technology perspectives can be discussed early on, before any development begins.
It’s worth asking:
The IT/OT conversation is often framed as a choice between connecting and separating.
A better goal is reliable access to the right information for the decisions that matter: access that doesn’t weaken the resilience operations depend on, and that holds up when it’s needed most.
Utilities get there by starting with decisions, making every connection and flow deliberate, and governing the trade-offs together. Those that do will be better placed to answer the hard questions, on an ordinary day and on the worst one.
