# Who Moved My Air Gap? The Slow Boiling Future of Industrial Security

- Link: https://www.agilicus.com/who-moved-my-air-gap-the-slow-boiling-future-of-industrial-security/
- Published: 2025-08-09T16:05:53+00:00
- Author: Don Bowman

There’s a classic [parable about a frog in a pot of water](https://www.theboilingfrog.net/just-what-is-this-boiling-frog-thing/).
If you drop a frog into boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if you 
place it in lukewarm water and slowly raise the temperature, the frog won’t perceive
the gradual danger and will, unfortunately, be cooked. The story is a grim but powerful
metaphor for how we react—or fail to react—to incremental change.

For decades, the world of industrial control systems and operational technology 
has been sitting in that pot. We started in a very safe, physically-oriented security
model. Thirty years ago, the plant floor was an island. Security meant having a 
key to the lock on the door. The so-called “air gap”—a complete physical separation
between the industrial network and the outside world—was our impenetrable fortress.
That was our block of “cheese,” and we felt secure.

### The Water is Getting Warmer

But then, progress happened. The temperature began to rise, degree by degree. It
wasn’t a sudden, boiling change, but a slow, creeping normality.

First, a new piece of equipment needed a license manager that had to ping a server
on the internet, so a tiny, firewalled hole was poked in the air gap. Then, commissioning
and support required a jump box or VPN for vendors to troubleshoot remotely. Remote
alarm monitoring evolved from a modem dialing a pager to an internet-delivered service.

Next thing you know, your plant is sending operational data to a cloud-based big
data platform for AI-driven predictive maintenance. Each of these steps, taken in
isolation, seemed like a reasonable and necessary evolution. But collectively, we’ve
woken up to find ourselves in a pot of nearly boiling water. The air gap we trusted
is now more like Swiss cheese—still there, but full of holes.

### You Can’t Turn Down the Heat

It’s tempting to get nostalgic for the old ways and demand a return to the “pure”
air gap. But we must face the reality of why this change is happening. You simply
can’t fight progress.

 * **Vendor Requirements:** Manufacturers are increasingly building products that
   require internet connectivity for everything from licensing and maintenance to
   core functionality. The fight over John Deere’s “right to repair” is a prime 
   example of how even tractors now have cellular modems and call home to the mothership.
 * **Cost and Practicality:** It’s far more efficient and cost-effective to leverage
   pooled, centralised cloud resources for heavy-duty tasks like big data analysis
   and training AI models than to build and maintain that infrastructure at every
   edge location.
 * **The Skills Gap:** The days of the generalist who could do everything are fading.
   Today, we rely on a smaller pool of deep specialists. To leverage their expertise
   across multiple sites, they need to be able to work remotely.

Trying to reverse this tide is like trying to put the cheese back where it used 
to be, as the characters in Spencer Johnson’s famous book learned. Change is inevitable.
The only viable path forward is to adapt.

### Learning to Swim in Secure Waters

Accepting this new reality doesn’t mean surrendering to insecurity. It means recognising
that your old defence mechanism is gone and you need a new one. If you’re going 
to have remote access—and you are—you may as well have _secure_ remote access.

The old model of punching holes in the perimeter is no longer defensible. The modern
approach must be built on a foundation of Zero Trust, where access is granted on
a least-privilege basis, explicitly verified, and limited to specific applications
for specific users at specific times. Instead of a wide-open VPN tunnel, imagine
giving a trusted vendor temporary access only to the one specific PLC they need 
to service, and nothing else.

This is Agilicus comes in. We make it simple to implement secure remote access for
your industrial plant, without the complexity of traditional IT solutions. We help
you navigate this new, connected world safely.

The water is hot, but it’s not too late to jump out of the pot. It’s time to stop
pretending the air gap is your armor and start building a security model that fits
the world we actually live in. Let’s ensure you can swim happily and safely, rather
than becoming an appetiser.