Resilience in Motion
How Manufacturers Can Overcome Their Top 5 Cybersecurity Challenges
Today’s manufacturers face five critical cyber risks that threaten growth and overcoming them is the key to building lasting resilience. We aim to show you how to improve manufacturing cybersecurity in this guide.
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Cybersecurity Is Key to Manufacturing Resilience
For manufacturers, cyber risk is more than an IT issue — it’s a production challenge. Downtime can cost anywhere from $20,000 to over $1 million per hour. And in just-in-time (JIT) operations, even brief interruptions ripple through supply chains and sales forecasts.
A single unexpected shutdown can derail weeks of planning and dent quarterly performance, but with proactive detection, anomaly monitoring and resilient continuity planning, TekStream helps manufacturers keep operations moving and stay ahead of disruption. While ransomware makes the headlines, it’s only one piece of the puzzle.
Challenge 1: Operational Downtime
Ransomware is a headline risk. But it’s not just about paying it — a single encrypted production line can halt output, costing millions in lost revenue and supply chain delays. Ransomware strikes at the heart of what matters most to manufacturing: uptime. The worry is keeping operations humming while balancing the cost of cyber defenses against tight budgets. Executives are even more blunt. They want assurances that a cyber incident won’t derail quarterly revenue, erode customer confidence or trigger penalties in supply contracts.
The Struggle to Keep Up With Ransomware
CIOs face the impossible task of safeguarding both IT and OT environments, where legacy machines often can’t be patched and where a compromise could halt an entire line. They see ransomware as the one threat that tests every weakness at once — visibility gaps, unmonitored vendors and resource constraints.
CISOs and their security analysts, closest to the ground, feel the urgency daily. They know attackers count on alert fatigue, exploiting environments where teams can’t respond quickly enough.
In manufacturing, this urgency is amplified: each hour of downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and unlike other industries, lost production can’t always be made up later. Manufacturers need a safety net to keep production moving.
The TekStream Cybersecurity Solution
TekStream uses Splunk to reduce downtime risk by catching attacks early and responding in real time. With AI-assisted threat detection layered into MDR and co-managed SOC services, manufacturers gain faster triage, fewer false positives and smarter prioritization of what truly matters. TekStream’s Splunk-certified expertise ensures that AI is applied responsibly, optimizing SIEM investments and closing gaps before attackers can exploit them.
“With TekStream and Splunk, cybersecurity moves beyond protection, becoming the engine of resilience and growth in modern manufacturing.”
Judd Robins, Executive Vice President
TekStream
Challenge 2: Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
Manufacturing doesn’t run in isolation. It’s a network of suppliers, contractors and software vendors. That means your resilience is only as strong as the weakest link. In a JIT world, one compromised supplier can halt data flows, freeze planning and stall production. What used to be a logistics hiccup is now a cybersecurity choke point.
The High Cost of Manufacturing Cyberattacks
CISOs know attackers deliberately target smaller suppliers because they’re easier to breach. CIOs worry about the ripple effect. If a vendor’s system goes down, your production line pays the price in hours, not weeks.
Executives see the business cost: inflated inputs, missed shipments, frustrated customers, and quarterly forecasts at risk. In today’s economy of inflationary pressures, volatile energy costs, and shifting trade policies, every disruption is magnified.
How TekStream Puts a Stop to Threat Actors
TekStream, powered by Splunk, treats the supply chain as part of the SOC, not an afterthought. Splunk delivers end-to-end visibility across IT, OT, cloud, and third-party data streams, while TekStream runs vendor risk assessments, builds compliance frameworks (NIST, CMMC, IEC 62443), and designs monitoring that catches abnormal supplier activity in real time.
The result? Instead of reacting to a downstream failure, manufacturers anticipate it, contain it, and keep production moving. With TekStream and Splunk, resilience is more than just defense. It serves as proof to boards, customers and regulators that your supply chain is secure enough to trust. Splunk enables end-to-end visibility across IT, cloud, and third-party data streams.
TekStream uses the power of Splunk to run risk and remediation assessments and can help build risk management programs, aligning with compliance frameworks like NIST, CMMC and IEC 62443. Together, they give manufacturers proactive monitoring of their extended ecosystem and help boards demonstrate resilience to customers and regulators.
“Splunk and Cisco deliver the data foundation, agentic intelligence, and cross-domain insights needed to build a more secure, resilient and always-on digital enterprise.”
Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM
Splunk
Challenge 3: IT/OT Convergence Gaps
Bridging traditional IT security with operational technology (OT) systems like PLCs and SCADA introduces blind spots. Many MDR solutions struggle to monitor both worlds effectively. IT/OT gaps represent a daily balancing act. They must keep plant systems talking to each other while ensuring that legacy machines remain reliable. The urgency here is operational continuity: if integration is sloppy, you could unintentionally disrupt a production line. That convergence is a security headache.
How Threat Actors Gain a Foothold Into Manufacturing Systems
Unlike IT systems, OT devices often can’t be patched or updated, making them prime targets for attackers. A single foothold in OT could give adversaries control over machinery, safety systems or production data.
Executives tie integration to efficiency and competitiveness. When IT and OT data flows are seamless, the business can forecast demand, reduce waste and cut costs. But when gaps exist, the risk of downtime or safety incidents becomes an existential threat.
It boils down to market timing: customers and investors expect modernization, but not at the cost of security or uptime.
TekStream’s Response to Plugging IT/OT Gaps
Splunk’s OT/IoT integrations pull telemetry and industrial protocols into one platform. TekStream designs segmentation strategies, detection playbooks and OT-aware monitoring rules.
With AI-enhanced visibility into both IT and OT traffic, TekStream and Splunk give manufacturers a formidable program that not only closes today’s blind spots but predicts tomorrow’s convergence risks.
“Turning risk into resilience, blind spots into visibility, and security into a competitive edge is the TekStream and Splunk advantage.”
Bruce Johnson, Senior Director, Enterprise Security
TekStream
Challenge 4: Legacy Systems and Unpatched Assets
Manufacturing plants often run on decades-old OT systems that cannot be easily patched or replaced. These systems widen the attack surface and create persistent vulnerabilities, yet modernization timelines are slow compared to evolving threats. Retiring or replacing them is costly and disruptive. Keeping them exposes the company to vulnerabilities that cannot be easily remediated.
Balancing Modernization With Manufacturing Cybersecurity Needs
Firms find the investment in modernization difficult to justify against budget constraints and operational inertia.
Higher costs of capital, thinner margins and customer demand for resilience mean leadership must act quickly to prioritize where investment reduces the most risk.
The TekStream Approach to Cyber Risk Management
TekStream provides risk prioritization roadmaps to help leadership decide which legacy assets must be segmented, monitored or modernized first.
Using Splunk, they detect abnormal behavior by baselining normal traffic and highlighting deviations, monitoring unpatchable devices for threat indicators without modifying the system.
“For manufacturers, the future is secure, efficient and resilient with TekStream and Splunk leading the way.”
Rob Jansen, Chief Executive Officer
TekStream
Challenge 5: Business Continuity Blind Spots
Many firms lack tested incident response and disaster recovery plans tailored to OT. Without resilient continuity planning, even minor breaches can escalate into multimillion-dollar downtime events.
The Financial Impact of Cybersecurity Blind Spots
For CIOs, the fear is that continuity planning is too focused on data recovery, not on operational recovery. In manufacturing, restoring files isn’t enough. You need tested playbooks for restarting production lines, reconnecting suppliers and resuming logistics.
Urgency comes from the knowledge that downtime costs in this sector can run tens of thousands to millions per hour, especially in JIT operations.
Executives care because continuity blind spots show up in financial reports. If a cyber event wipes out a week of production, sales forecasts collapse, customers churn and penalties kick in. Thin margins and competitive markets make every day of disruption a risk of lasting business loss.
From Plan to Proven, Measurable Results
TekStream and Splunk turn continuity from a paper plan into a tested, measurable capability that reduces downtime costs and proves resilience to customers and insurers.
Using incident response and disaster recovery playbooks tailored for OT — not just IT — they run tabletop exercises and simulate ransomware scenarios specific to plant operations.
Jaguar Land Rover Incident
The 2025 cyberattack on JLR forced a global systems shutdown and full disruption of manufacturing and retail operations. In their public statements, JLR noted that they had to take down critical systems proactively to prevent further spread, a decision inherently tied to business continuity.
To help the company recover and protect downstream suppliers, the U.K. government granted JLR a £1.5 billion loan guarantee. In coverage of the incident, analysts highlighted how JLR’s continuity plans needed to account for operational systems, not just data, and how the resilience of the supply chain and production was heavily tested.
Turning Manufacturing Cybersecurity Challenges Into Growth Opportunities
The future of manufacturing isn’t defined by cyber risk. It’s defined by resilience, innovation and growth. While ransomware, supply chain disruptions and legacy systems pose challenges, TekStream and Splunk turn them into opportunities to modernize operations and build trust.
By harnessing unified IT and OT data, applying AI to detect anomalies at scale, automating response and proving continuity, manufacturers can strengthen security while unlocking new efficiencies. Instead of just being about defense, cybersecurity becomes a catalyst for smarter factories, stronger customer relationships and lasting competitive advantage.
