ISO 27001

ISO 27001 Controls for Industrial Operations and OT Environments

Published 2026-02-06 by ForgeCert Editorial

Industrial teams often inherit ISO 27001 templates built for office IT. Those templates fail in OT-heavy environments.

Prioritize asset context first

Before control mapping, classify assets by operational criticality:

• Safety critical
• Production critical
• Business support

Control depth should scale with operational impact.

Focus on high-friction controls

In industrial environments, these controls typically need custom workflows:

• Access provisioning for vendor and contractor accounts
• Patch and vulnerability management for legacy systems
• Backup and recovery validation for PLC and historian systems

Train both IT and OT owners

Split learning modules by accountability:

• IT team: identity, log review, incident handling
• OT team: asset behavior baselines, change management, fail-safe procedures
• Leadership: risk acceptance and investment tradeoffs

Test controls with realistic downtime constraints

Control design is only valid if it can be executed during production windows. Include operations leadership in every control simulation.