Emerging Threats in Manufacturing
RealVNC surveyed 323 IT professionals across seven industries for our Emerging Threats in Remote Access Security report. Manufacturing’s results were some of the most telling in the whole study, and telling enough that we’ve pulled the manufacturing-specific findings into their own mini-report, Emerging Threats in Manufacturing: High Ambition, Ageing Infrastructure. Manufacturing made up 11% of respondents, all of them IT professionals working in organisations that currently rely on remote access to manage their environments, whether that’s a single site or a network of sites spread across regions.
1. The Confidence Gap
Manufacturing’s confidence rate is the second-highest of any industry in the survey, yet 53% of manufacturing organisations reported a remote access incident in the past 24 months. 62% of the teams who rated themselves highly confident were among them. Feeling secure and being secure are certainly not the same thing.
2. Infrastructure Debt, Compounding
Platform upgrades are the most deprioritised task in manufacturing, at 56%, the highest of any sector surveyed. It’s the only industry where infrastructure work loses out to security hardening as the first thing to get cut, and it’s worth understanding why that trade-off keeps happening.
Ageing infrastructure often keeps production running today, and security hardening feels like the more urgent fire to put out in the moment. Which is why platform upgrades get pushed back again and again. But the report’s data suggests this is a compounding problem, not a static one. More precisely, newer security controls layered onto ageing platforms don’t close gaps, they add even more complexity on top of them. Foundational protections like encryption at rest and session recording were also among the lowest of any sector in our survey, which is only natural with infrastructure that hasn’t kept pace.
Manufacturing’s compliance landscape is comparatively light too, with ISO 27001 the most common standard, and 15% of respondents reporting no applicable compliance obligations at all, which may be reducing the sense of urgency around infrastructure investment even as exposure grows. Each deferred upgrade also raises the cost of the next one, because new tooling increasingly has to work around ageing platforms rather than alongside modern ones.
3. A Widening Zero Trust Gap
74% of manufacturing respondents name Zero Trust a top priority, the strongest commitment outside MSP and IT Services. Only 29% have actually implemented it, a 45-point gap between intent and delivery.
Left as is, that gap has room to widen rather than close. Manufacturing environments are only getting more connected as production technology modernises, which means Zero Trust segmentation makes more sense with every year. However, the resourcing to build it (budget at 50%, skilled personnel at 44%, the two most-cited blockers) doesn’t necessarily grow at the same pace. The sector’s other forward-looking priorities tell a similar story: employee training (76%) and compliance readiness (68%) both rank above the cross-industry average, so this isn’t a sector short on ambition. It’s specifically short on the capacity to convert that ambition into deployed controls before the environment it’s meant to protect changes shape again.
Manufacturing teams know what needs fixing, but the constraint is resourcing it, rather than the roadmap. Get the full manufacturing-specific data, including the sector’s threat profile and a practical starting point for closing the gap, in the free mini-report.
