Kristin Demoranville

But there's no, how is an end user supposed to navigate all these products when they're already working on slim margins and whatnot? Because you know, this being in the utilities, there's no money, like money's allocated out. It's forecasted to hell. Right. The food industry is the same way. And everybody runs on slim margins and slim production because they want to get things moving.

And they call it efficiency. They bring in just product enough that they have to get in and then push it out. It's never anymore. So there's no spoilage or overflow. The water industry actually is learning how to feed itself, as I say, where they're selling their gray water to data centers that are close by to them. Brilliant, brilliant strategy, right?

But that now means that OT is in data centers even more than it was before. Yeah. Has anybody thought about that? Because your cloud needs OT. Like, hello. It's pretty obvious. Right. And the water guys need more and more love because they don't get any either.

And I will advocate for them until I turn blue in the face as well, because we need water for so much stuff in the food and ag industry, obviously. And we already have droughts everywhere. So there's that. moment as well. Glaciers are melting.

It's true. And I have a similar situation. My dad was a fireman for 45 years and that was all industrial equipment and DLCs and various other things. And he never really made the connection until I explained what I did. And then he kind of was like, huh, so you're like a chip off the block kid, aren't you? Like, this is like a continual theme.

I said, yeah, civil service clearly runs with the family, dad. I mean, exactly. That's really kind of what we're doing is social service. But yeah, no, absolutely. The more we added tech into these environments, and I mean tech by like internet ready, IoT, that kind of stuff. The more we turned all these legacy devices onto the internet, they were like, whoa, what is this?

I don't know if I like this space. I might cause a problem now. It's kind of like you gave your grandparents like a cell phone.

or smartphone and they were like what is this and all of a sudden they started falling for all those scams it's kind of the way legacy tech works you know it's sort of just like oh hey you're my friend come on in i don't know you like and the problem is we didn't put any car rails around that at the beginning and now we're still kind of digging out and it's so funny because you go around the world and it's the same everywhere yeah it's no i mean that's that's the united front for us like it's it's really quite brilliant in that regard i thought i was going to deal with it less in certain countries than i did in others and it's the same all around

Right. Right.

you have here's the number it's about 150 or something like that right find them all like a scavenger hunt right yeah i think that'd be cool so if somebody does it let us know because we totally want to participate and probably dominate it and win it but i just act how i used to do it too when i'd be sitting around with people who didn't understand i said well where we are right now i can count at least six devices that are close to us that run that type of equipment and they're like well

I don't understand. I said that elevator, that alone, like, you know, that kind of thing. And it's, it's so interesting watching people realize, oh, well, I've worked with that kind of equipment before. Well, you've been an OT then. Like that's, I'm not saying you are an OT person, but you have worked in it before.

I actually jumped into OT at a bakery company and I didn't even make the connection. I was doing OT because I was doing IT. We didn't have an OT department. We were the OT department. But I didn't know all the really cool technology names and bells and whistles and things. I just was like, yeah, the thing that goes over there and doesn't kill anybody. Like that's all I recognized it as.

And realizing as I moved through my career, I was like, oh, I've been an OT for a while. Yeah. Okay. Like, that's fine. But I enjoy it because we're protecting people. It's not just about the data because data is sexy. Don't get me wrong. It's like, you know, the new gold and we all love it because it's cool and gives us good things we can look at.

But the idea to be able to sit at the end of the day and realize that you helped save someone's life and kept them to go home to their family. Like, that's amazing. Like, that feels really good. Really, really good.

And I want to continue to do that, especially when it comes to food, because we're like a breath away from a foodborne illness because we don't understand food security around the tech that's in these environments. And we just keep adding more stuff because digitalization is a huge thing in the industry. Sure. They've been automating forever.

You know, if you think about the food industry as a whole, how it's come up, you know, we originally were the ones plowing the field and then we attached the cattle, horse, and then we moved to the tractor and dah, dah, dah, dah. The food industry has been innovating forever. They're great innovators. R&D is fantastic. I mean, we have lab grown meat now. Hello.

Like these are things that are like kind of crazy. We can 3D print a salmon. It'll be pro team, but we can do it. So for me, why aren't we attaching cybersecurity to technology more? And I don't want to get into the whole product security conversation because that's a whole different rabbit hole. And I blessings upon the people who do that work.

But why aren't we having more of that conversation inside of these environments? It's because cyber needs a rebrand for OT. We literally cannot explain what we do very well. And I think if we could, we'd probably win more hearts and minds for that people process us for sure.

Yeah, no, exactly. And I think we have to think beyond it inside of the OT environment. So I'll give an example, right? You have an allergen issue inside of a factory. So you have a peanut area and a non-peanut area. You have a disgruntled employee that goes from the peanut area to the non-peanut area. Whose problem is that? Right. Sure. Food safety, food defense. Absolutely.

You get that problem. But it's also cybersecurity's problem because with the industry that we work in, food and ag, cyber physical is still cybersecurity to me. Physical security is still cybersecurity to me. That access control should have been managed better, whether it would have been biometrics, if you could do that without gloves or those kind of things, eye scans, badge readers, that's cyber.