Executive Summary
Industrial organizations face a critical decision point with their legacy operational technology: accept growing cyber risks, isolate critical systems from needed connectivity, force expensive premature replacement, or pursue strategic asset life extension. Recent industry data reveal that 85% of organizations struggle with the security limitations of legacy systems, while forced replacement strategies cost 60-80% more than protection-focused approaches. TXOne Networks enables a fourth path—strategic asset life extension that delivers 7-10 years of secure operation and documented cost avoidance of $2-5 million per legacy system.
This report examines how organizations can transform legacy systems from security liabilities into strategically managed assets through comprehensive protection strategies, without forcing operational disruptions or premature capital investments.
Legacy OT at the Breaking Point: The Real Cost of Impossible Choices
When replacement costs millions, how do you protect what you can’t patch?
Picture this: In a food manufacturing plant, a Windows XP workstation manages one of the plant’s highest-throughput lines. The system runs a custom-built HMI (human-machine interface) application that communicates with controllers over industrial protocols to manage batching sequences. The hardware is aging but stable, having functioned reliably for years. The application is deeply integrated with it, and the hardware’s original vendor is no longer in business.
Here’s the impossible situation: any attempts to update the operating system or patch the software would break the driver compatibility and sever communication with the controllers. The plant’s operations team has learned this through experience—this workstation is not to be touched. Scheduled downtime is vanishingly scarce, and reboots are avoided unless absolutely necessary. Replacing this single system would require $2.4 million in equipment costs, six months of revalidation, and two weeks of production downtime.
Recently, that system was compromised. A USB device used to transfer an updated recipe breached the air gap intended to protect the asset. The workstation couldn’t support modern security software due to its age. With no endpoint detection, logs, or telemetry, the compromise went unnoticed until alerts were triggered on an upstream firewall. By that point, ransomware had already taken hold.
Production halted. Shipments were delayed. And the organization faced the question many are grappling with today: How can we quickly restore operations and prevent future shutdowns without replacing the load-bearing legacy assets that have kept these operations running for so long?
This isn’t a unique scenario. Across various industrial sectors, including energy, semiconductors, food processing, and pharmaceuticals, outdated yet indispensable systems remain in use. These assets are central to production processes, but they were never designed to withstand cybersecurity threats that emerged through technological leaps unimaginable when these systems were built. Nor were they engineered to comply with expanding regulations that now demand vulnerability reporting, incident response, and real-time visibility.
The Legacy System Dilemma: Your Four Options
When confronting legacy system security challenges, organizations typically face four paths:
- Manual Risk Acceptance: Continuing operations while hoping nothing breaks—leaving assets dangerously exposed to escalating threats and lacking audit-ready compliance evidence
- Network Isolation Strategies: Physically or logically segment legacy systems—often disrupting legitimate communications needed for operations, without providing real threat prevention
- Forced Replacement: Replace functional equipment at 60-80% higher cost than protection strategies—requiring millions in capital investment and months of revalidation
- Strategic Asset Life Extension: Protect legacy systems without modifications—enabling 7-10 years of secure operation extension at $2-5M cost avoidance per system
This report explores the fourth path and why it’s becoming the preferred strategy for organizations that need both security and operational continuity.
Legacy Systems Don’t Have to Be Liabilities: The Transformation Opportunity
You can’t easily replace what runs the plant. But you can extend its secure life.
In industrial environments, particularly those within critical infrastructure sectors, legacy systems are typically embedded into operations and remain central to production. They were designed for uptime and availability above all. At the time, physical isolation was considered adequate protection—and it was indeed effective.
But that era has passed. Convergence is gathering momentum, yet legacy technologies remain a sticking point that can’t be removed without dismantling the entire structure. The business case for keeping them is compelling: functional equipment that costs millions, still performing its role reliably, with replacement requiring massive capital investment and operational disruption.
At TXOne Networks, we understand this reality. As the OT Security Transformation Partner, we enable organizations to transform legacy systems from security liabilities into strategically managed assets. Rather than forcing expensive equipment replacement, we provide comprehensive protection that extends secure operational life by 7-10 years while building security foundations that support future digital transformation initiatives.
The Data Supports Strategic Extension
The challenge is both widespread and well-documented. In TXOne’s 2024 global OT/ICS cybersecurity survey, 85% of organizations reported that legacy systems limit their ability to apply timely security patches. One-third said they have no effective endpoint protection for these systems. Only 22% maintain complete asset visibility across their OT environments, and 41% continue to use default credentials on industrial devices.
In a separate survey of 550 OT and ICS security decision-makers across six European countries, half reported that at least 50% of their OT environments still rely on legacy systems. For one in five organizations, that number exceeds 75%. Compatibility with existing equipment and high replacement costs were the most commonly cited reasons for maintaining legacy infrastructure, selected by 54% and 45% of respondents, respectively.
So, despite the headache legacy technology presents to security and operations teams alike, it’s not going anywhere. Instead, these systems remain central to operations across critical infrastructure sectors, including energy, semiconductors, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. The question isn’t whether legacy systems will stay—it’s whether they’ll remain secure.
The Strategic Asset Management Approach
Rather than crisis-driven replacement, strategic asset life extension enables:
- Investment Protection: Maximize returns on functional legacy systems with remaining operational value
- Business-Aligned Planning: Schedule modernization based on business optimization, not ad-hoc security emergencies
- Compliance Continuity: Maintain regulatory compliance for systems beyond vendor support
- Operational Excellence: Preserve production capabilities while strengthening security posture
- Transformation Foundation: Build security architecture that supports future digital initiatives
Convergence Reality: We Understand Your Operational Requirements
You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube—but you can secure what’s connected.
Air-gapping is no longer a valid security model for OT environments. Over time, the separation between IT and OT has eroded—not because of neglect or poor planning, but because your business needed to keep pace with technological advances to remain competitive.
We’ve seen this across thousands of deployments: operational demands push industrial environments to become more connected. Remote access becomes necessary for maintenance, support, and real-time monitoring. Integration with enterprise systems enables just-in-time manufacturing, logistics optimization, and supply chain coordination. Downtime is expensive, and centralized oversight is efficient. Connectivity delivers both and has therefore become a necessity.
At TXOne, we recognize this operational reality. We don’t ask you to choose between security and the connectivity your operations require. Instead, our operations-first approach ensures security strengthens—rather than compromises—your operational capabilities.
This shift has happened gradually, but the result is clear. IT and OT systems now share more than just a power supply—they often share networks, credentials, infrastructure, and vulnerabilities. Remote desktop access to operator workstations, VPN connections into control servers, and Active Directory authentication for operator accounts—these are no longer exceptions. They are standard practice.
The problem is that legacy systems, built for physical isolation, were never intended to operate under these conditions. They lack access controls, logging, and the ability to authenticate or inspect traffic. Many still trust any device that speaks their protocol. And the more connected they become, the easier it is for both legitimate operations and potential threats to reach them.
Modern Threats Target Legacy Systems: Know Your Adversary
Threat actors specifically target legacy systems because they are aware of their vulnerabilities.
Threat actors have adapted quickly to the blurring of the IT-OT boundary. They increasingly design attacks with OT environments as the intended target—no longer collateral damage alongside IT incidents, but the primary objective. And legacy systems, with their known vulnerabilities and limited defenses, are high-value targets.
The Threat Landscape Evolution
Ransomware groups now develop tactics specifically geared toward moving laterally into OT networks, taking advantage of their flat architectures. Shared credentials, default logins, and unsecured remote access points provide convenient footholds for initial access. Once inside, attackers don’t necessarily need advanced exploits. Unsecured communication protocols, unsegmented traffic paths, and the absence of endpoint protection provide all the opportunities they need to identify viable targets, especially when those targets include legacy systems. The chances of persistence and subsequent disruption increase dramatically.
State-sponsored threat actors have also emerged as significant risks. Volt Typhoon, discovered targeting critical infrastructure sectors across the United States and its allies, focuses on strategic disruption rather than financial gain. Their tactics emphasize stealth and pre-positioning, utilizing legitimate tools such as VPN clients, remote management interfaces, and command-line utilities to maintain access quietly until disruption is needed. The connectivity introduced by convergence is precisely how they get in, and legacy systems lacking modern security controls are where they establish persistence.
Control-level attacks represent the deepest threat. Malware like FrostyGoop exploits unauthenticated industrial protocols to issue commands directly to sensors and actuators. In environments lacking segmentation or protocol enforcement, this malware doesn’t need to exploit a vulnerability. It simply needs to speak the language that legacy systems were never taught to question.
So what does this mean for your legacy systems? When a compromise happens, there might not even be a record or alert to mark its occurrence. In some cases, there may not even be a functioning interface to conduct forensic analysis after the fact. Threat actors understand this reality—and the absence of basic controls in legacy OT environments has become so glaring, it’s more of an invitation than a vulnerability.
Compliance Without Replacement: Meeting Regulatory Requirements for Legacy Assets
Regulations now require security across ALL systems—regardless of age.
As time continues to reveal the dangers posed by today’s threat actors, the implications of weak cybersecurity have reached the highest levels of leadership. Governments around the world are taking notice—and, more importantly, taking action. What was once considered best practice is now becoming a legal requirement. These requirements apply to legacy systems just as much as to modern infrastructure.
The Expanding Regulatory Landscape
From the EU’s NIS2 to the U.S. Department of Defense’s CMMC, regulatory frameworks are evolving to address the growing risk posed by converged environments and the legacy systems embedded within them. These regulations extend far beyond traditional IT compliance, encompassing asset visibility, risk-based vulnerability management, incident response timelines, supply chain security, and secure remote access policies.
The shift is significant. Under NIS2, organizations designated as essential or important entities must report major security incidents within 24 hours and demonstrate the technical and organizational controls they have in place to manage cyber risk and facilitate recovery. That includes legacy systems. The EU’s proposed CRA requires vendors to account for vulnerabilities throughout a product’s lifecycle, including long after it has been deployed into the field—illustrating just how granular these regulations have become.
In the U.S., the CMMC framework includes requirements that indirectly impact legacy OT, such as continuous monitoring, control over unauthorized devices, and protection of sensitive information across mixed IT/OT environments. Operators of critical infrastructure also face sector-specific regulations—from the TSA’s pipeline security directives to evolving internal network monitoring requirements under the electric sector’s NERC CIP standards.
Asia’s industrial leaders are also moving in this direction. Taiwan and Japan, both global manufacturing hubs, are implementing OT security frameworks that align with their national resilience strategies. These require enterprises to demonstrate due diligence in hardening control system endpoints and validating the security of third-party suppliers before granting them access to operational networks.
Strategic Compliance Enablement
So what does this mean for organizations with legacy systems? These changes are no longer hypothetical. They are real, enforceable, and audited by regulatory bodies. In this new climate, having legacy systems without compensating controls is a compliance risk that can result in penalties, operational restrictions, or mandated replacements.
TXOne’s approach provides:
- Documented Compensating Controls: Audit-ready evidence that demonstrates proper risk management
- Continuous Compliance Monitoring: Ongoing validation that legacy systems remain protected
- Vendor-Independent Support: Security that doesn’t depend on long-gone OEMs
- Compliance Documentation: Detailed reports showing protection measures and effectiveness
Rather than forcing replacement to achieve compliance, strategic asset life extension enables organizations to meet regulatory requirements while preserving functional equipment and avoiding massive capital investments.
Customer Success: Strategic Life Extension in Action
Leading organizations are achieving tangible results through asset life extension.
Pharmaceutical Manufacturing: Validated Systems Protection
The Challenge: A global pharmaceutical manufacturer operated critical production lines with Windows XP-based control systems that were validated and certified for FDA compliance. The validation process had cost $6.8 million and had taken 18 months. Replacing the systems would require repeating this entire process, but keeping them left them exposed to increasing cyber threats and compliance scrutiny. The company faced pressure from auditors to demonstrate security controls, but traditional security solutions would invalidate the systems.
The TXOne Response: Working as a strategic transformation partner, TXOne deployed comprehensive legacy protection across network and endpoint vectors without requiring any modifications to the validated Windows XP systems. The solution provided:
- Virtual patching for known vulnerabilities without touching validated systems
- Behavioral analysis preventing unknown threats while preserving performance
- Detailed compliance documentation demonstrating security controls
- Zero-disruption implementation, maintaining production schedules
The Measurable Results: The pharmaceutical manufacturer achieved a 9-year secure life extension for critical validated systems, avoiding $5.4 million in replacement and revalidation costs. The solution maintained FDA compliance through documented compensating controls, enabling the company to strategically plan equipment upgrades based on business needs rather than security emergencies. The total investment in protection represented 12% of the replacement cost, delivering 8x ROI through extended asset life.
The Strategic Partnership Approach: Beyond Point Solutions
You can’t protect a converged environment with a divided approach—or transform operations with tactical tools.
The days when IT and OT could be secured separately are over. In a connected industrial environment, business systems and factory systems share networks, credentials, and risks. A compromise on one side can quickly spread to the other, often before anyone realizes what’s happening.
At TXOne, we don’t just sell security products—we partner with organizations to transform their approach to industrial cybersecurity. As your OT Security Transformation Partner, we enable strategic asset life extension that delivers measurable business value while building a robust security foundation that supports your digital transformation initiatives.
The Transformation Partnership Framework
1. Strategic Asset Assessment
We begin by understanding your complete legacy environment—not just to identify vulnerabilities, but to recognize the business value these assets represent. Our ElementOne platform provides comprehensive visibility across your entire industrial environment, whether devices are new or old, patched or vulnerable. This builds a live inventory, monitors device behavior, and helps prioritize risk based on business impact.
2. Unified Protection Without Modification
Many legacy assets can’t run traditional security software without crashing or slowing down. Our Stellar series offers purpose-built protection that works even on systems like Windows XP, using trust-based controls, memory protection, and behavior monitoring—all tuned for industrial workloads. The CPSDR (Cyber-Physical Systems Detection and Response) technology learns behavioral benchmarks and quarantines any abnormal behavior before it can affect operational processes.
For network-accessible threats, EdgeIPS and EdgeFire devices provide control over the pathways between IT and OT. They inspect traffic down to the protocol level, understand industrial communications, and can prevent unauthorized commands from reaching critical machines. Even if an attacker breaches one system, micro-segmentation keeps them from moving laterally.
3. Operational Continuity Assurance
Our operations-first approach ensures security strengthens rather than compromises your production capabilities. Hardware bypass technology guarantees that operations continue even if security systems require maintenance. Transparent deployment means no changes to legacy systems, preserving warranties, validations, and operational characteristics.
4. Third-Party Risk Management
Portable Inspector is designed for real-world environments where contractors bring in USBs, laptops, and diagnostic tools. It scans removable media for threats before they enter your network and supports quick inspections without interrupting ongoing work.
5. Unified Management and Visibility
With EdgeOne, our centralized management console, you can enforce security policies across your entire environment, track compliance, and respond to threats more quickly. You don’t need multiple dashboards or separate rule sets for each system—just one interface that speaks both IT and OT.
The Business Case for Strategic Partnership
This kind of unified approach is no longer a nice-to-have; it is now a must-have. According to TXOne’s 2024 OT/ICS Cybersecurity Report, 68% of organizations that experienced an IT security incident also saw it affect their OT environment. That spillover illustrates how convergence can easily lead to contagion.
The strategic partnership delivers:
- 7-10 Year Secure Life Extension: Documented extension of legacy system operational life without security compromise
- $2-5M Cost Avoidance: Average documented savings per legacy system compared to forced replacement strategies
- 12-18 Month Payback Periods: Rapid ROI through operational protection effectiveness
- 95% Attack Surface Reduction: Measurable security improvement through unified defense-in-depth approach
- 100% Operational Continuity: Zero production disruptions during and after implementation
- Compliance Documentation: Audit-ready evidence demonstrating proper legacy system risk management
- Transformation Foundation: Security architecture supporting future digital transformation initiatives
TXOne’s suite of solutions forms a cybersecurity architecture—not a patchwork of ad-hoc mitigations applied after damage is done. It’s purpose-built for converged environments, where connectivity is essential, legacy systems can’t be replaced, and operations can’t afford to stop.
Your Path Forward: Strategic Choices for Legacy System Security
Industrial cybersecurity is no longer about choosing between security and operations; it’s about achieving a balance between the two. It’s about finding partners who understand that your legacy systems represent significant business value and operational excellence—not just technical debt to be eliminated.
If your operations rely on legacy systems, allow remote maintenance, or fall under new regulatory oversight, you’re already in a converged environment. The question isn’t whether to act—it’s how to act strategically.
About TXOne Networks
TXOne Networks is the OT Security Transformation Partner for industrial organizations worldwide, specializing in strategic asset life extension that enables digital transformation without forcing expensive equipment replacement. With over 2,000 mission-critical deployments and documented success, allowing 7-10 years of secure life extension and $2-5M average cost avoidance per legacy system, TXOne delivers comprehensive OT security that strengthens—rather than compromises—operational excellence.
Our operations-first approach, purpose-built for industrial environments, has earned the trust of global leaders across critical infrastructure, manufacturing, and industrial sectors. We don’t just secure your operations—we partner with you to transform your approach to industrial cybersecurity.
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