Building Cyber Resilience: A 2025 Strategy Guide for Manufacturing and Healthcare Organizations

The growth of connected devices in manufacturing and healthcare (IoT, OT, IoMT) has created unprecedented opportunities for innovation and efficiency. However, this connectivity brings increased cyber risk. Manufacturing now accounts for 25.7% of all cyberattacks, with ransomware involved in 71% of these incidents. Healthcare organizations face similar challenges, with cybersecurity incidents causing potential harm not just to operations but to patient safety and care delivery.

The Evolution of Cyber Threats in Critical Industries

Manufacturing and healthcare organizations are experiencing a fundamental shift in their risk landscape. The convergence of operational technology (OT) with traditional IT systems, coupled with the rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud services, has expanded the attack surface dramatically. In February 2024, a German battery manufacturer experienced a two-week production halt due to a cyberattack, demonstrating how cyber incidents can bring critical operations to a standstill.

Understanding the True Cost of Cyber Incidents

The impact of cyber attacks extends far beyond immediate financial losses. For manufacturing organizations, production downtime can cost millions per hour, while healthcare organizations face both operational disruption and potential patient safety risks. The average cost of a data breach in healthcare reached $10.93 million in 2023, nearly double that of other industries.

Why Traditional Security Measures Fall Short

The Limitations of Legacy Security Architecture

Traditional security approaches built around firewalls and VLANs are proving inadequate in today's sophisticated threat landscape. These perimeter-based defenses operate on an outdated "castle-and-moat" model that assumes everything inside the network can be trusted. This approach fails to address modern attack methods where threats often originate from within the network. Network segmentation through traditional VLANs creates additional complexity and often leads to misconfigurations that can be exploited by attackers.

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) Is Not Enough

While EDR solutions provide valuable protection at the endpoint level, they face significant limitations in modern enterprise environments. EDR tools struggle with visibility into broader network traffic and data flows, making it difficult to prevent lateral movement once a single endpoint is compromised. Additionally, many legacy systems and OT devices in manufacturing and healthcare environments cannot support EDR agents, creating blind spots in attack surface coverage.

Building a Comprehensive Cyber Resilience Framework

Identity-based microsegmentation provides several crucial advantages for building cyber resilience:

• Proactive prevention of lateral movement during attacks
• Automated policy enforcement based on real-time context
• Seamless protection across hybrid environments
• Reduced attack surface through granular access control across all users, workloads and devices (including IT, IoT, OT, IoMT)
• Continuous policy updates based on identity and risk scoring

Regulatory Requirements and Compliance

The healthcare sector must comply with HIPAA and HITECH regulations, which mandate strong security controls for protected health information (PHI). The HHS 405(d) Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices specifically recommends microsegmentation as a key control. For manufacturing, the IEC-62443 standard emphasizes zone-based security and network segmentation. Both sectors often need to comply with PCI DSS requirements, which mandate network segmentation for protecting cardholder data environments.

People and Process Considerations

Successful cyber resilience strategies begin with strong governance and clear responsibilities. Security teams must work closely with operational teams to ensure security measures align with business requirements. Organizations should establish regular training programs and conduct tabletop exercises to maintain readiness for cyber incidents.

Technology Investment Priorities

Modern security architecture requires strategic investment in cloud-delivered security platforms that enable consistent policy enforcement across hybrid environments. These platforms should provide comprehensive visibility and support automated dynamic policy creation and management. Organizations should prioritize solutions that integrate with existing infrastructure, security tech stacks and support rapid incident response and recovery capabilities.

Measuring Success and Continuous Improvement

Organizations must establish clear metrics for measuring cyber resilience, including time to detect and respond to security incidents, impact reduction from security events, and coverage of critical assets under security controls. Regular assessment and adjustment of security measures ensure continuous improvement in the organization's security posture.

Next Steps

As we move through 2025, manufacturing and healthcare organizations must prioritize cyber resilience to ensure sustainable operations in an increasingly hostile threat environment. Zero-trust microsegmentation provides a foundation for this resilience by enabling granular control over network communications while supporting critical operations. Organizations should begin by assessing their current security posture and developing a roadmap for implementing comprehensive cyber resilience measures that include modern microsegmentation capabilities.

The time to act is now. With proper planning and implementation of modern security controls like microsegmentation, organizations can significantly improve their ability to withstand and recover from cyber incidents while maintaining essential operations. Success requires a balanced approach that combines modern security architecture with strong governance and operational processes.

A notable comment was published in the Forrester Wave™ Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3, 2024  "Network infrastructure vendors have long had microsegmentation solutions on the market, but they were prone to project failure, usually due to complexity. Elisity makes this old idea work by removing the complexity, compressing the policy, and leveraging multiple vendors’ switch fabrics to enable microsegmentation.”  Download your copy of the Forrester Wave™ Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3, 2024 

Elisity solution engineers are happy to discuss your goals for enabling a stronger cyber resilience program and preventing widespread damage from ransomware and other attacks; schedule a conversation or demo with Elisity today.