OT/IoT Incident Response Plan

Overview

A generic incident response plan written for a corporate IT environment does not survive contact with a substation, a SCADA HMI, or an IIoT gateway. Containment actions that are reflexive in IT — pulling a network cable, isolating an endpoint, force-rebooting a server — can have safety, continuity, or regulatory consequences on the plant floor.

xCIRT’s OT/IoT Incident Response Plan is purpose-built for cloud-connected industrial environments. It covers the full path from hyperscaler workloads through to PLCs and field IoT, and is written to the realities of your sector.

What’s included

• Asset inventory and dependency mapping — Cloud workloads, IT systems, OT controllers, IIoT gateways, and the integration points between them.
• Network segmentation review — Validating IT/OT boundary controls, conduits between zones, and remote-access pathways into OT.
• Containment procedures that respect safety — Decision trees for isolation actions, with explicit handoff to operations and engineering for safety-critical decisions.
• Sector-specific playbooks — Tailored to the operational context of energy, water, gas, ports, rail, or aviation.
• Recovery procedures — Including OT integrity checks (PLC validation, safety-system verification) before return-to-service.
• SOCI / CIRMP reporting alignment — Templates and decision criteria mapped to ASD/ACSC and CISC obligations.
• Tabletop scenarios — At least one blended IT/OT scenario built around your estate.

How it works

1. Discovery — Workshops with security, IT, OT, and operations to understand the estate, the threat model, and the regulatory context.
2. Plan development — IR plan drafted, reviewed with your team, and aligned to IEC 62443, AESCSF (if applicable), and SOCI/CIRMP.
3. Tabletop validation — At least one tabletop exercise to pressure-test the plan with your team.
4. Maintenance — Subscription updates as your estate, sector regulations, or threat landscape change.

Outcomes

A documented, drilled, sector-aware IR plan that gives your board, operations team, and regulators confidence that the cloud-connected OT estate has a credible response capability — Australian-staffed, onshore, and ready to engage inside two hours.