Walk onto any modern plant floor and you can almost feel the data moving — sensors humming, robots pivoting, dashboards lighting up with real‑time insights. That digital heartbeat runs on operational technology (OT), yet every new connection is a new cyberattack surface. Executives have noticed, frontline teams have noticed and, judging by recent data, nearly every manufacturer on the planet has noticed enough to act.
Rockwell Automation’s 10th Annual State of Smart Manufacturing Report captures the shift. Drawing on responses from 1,560 decision-makers across 17 leading manufacturing nations, representing companies that range from $100-million operations to multi-billion dollar enterprises, the survey ranks cybersecurity right alongside safety, throughput and cost as a core performance metric. When cyber resilience sits shoulder‑to‑shoulder with production KPIs, the discussion shifts from “Should we invest?” to “How fast can we prove payback?”
According to the report, 96% of manufacturers have already or plan to invest in cybersecurity platforms within the next five years, and more than half are already adopting cybersecurity at-scale. Executives who once treated security as a compliance tax now ask how many audit hours disappear, how much downtime is avoided and how quickly AI‑ready data streams open up once networks are hardened. In short: Resilience has become a profit lever.
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