Continuous Monitoring Is Necessary. Continuous Exposure Is Not. 

Across critical infrastructure, continuous monitoring has increasingly been implemented through polling, persistent connectivity and continuously exposed devices.

As operational environments scale to tens of millions of connected endpoints, that communication burden increasingly drives exposure, latency, operational fragility and escalating operational expenses. 

The more frequent the polling, ping or heartbeat interval, the more operationally critical the device or system typically is—effectively creating a roadmap for adversarial targeting. 

This challenge becomes increasingly important as artificial intelligence, automation, distributed energy resource coordination and autonomous machine-to-machine operations accelerate across operational technology and grid-edge environments. 

We believe the industry is approaching the next operational evolution of zero trust: extending trust enforcement beyond identity, access and session layers to the operational device and data layers where machine interactions and physical outcomes actually occur.  

That capability becomes increasingly imperative for the next generation of zero trust.

Continuous monitoring remains essential—continuous exposure does not. 

This short video helps frame the operational trust gap emerging across connected infrastructure environments.

The views and opinions expressed in guest posts and/or profiles are those of the authors or sources and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Security Industry Association.

This article originally appeared in the Utility Brief, a newsletter presented by the SIA Utilities Advisory Board.