The Value of Cyber Range for OT and Cyber Physical Systems

Nation-state actors and sophisticated criminal groups are no longer content with disrupting IT networks; they’re moving into the physical world. The convergence of IT and OT is a reality, and with it comes a new class of risk that can disrupt production, compromise safety, and trigger physical damage.

For the modern CISO or SOC manager, the challenge is clear: how do you train your teams to defend an attack surface that includes industrial control systems, SCADA environments, and other cyber physical systems (CPS)? How do you test your tools and processes against threats that can have tangible, real-world consequences? The answer isn’t another GRC framework or a static tabletop exercise; it’s a realistic cyber range.

As highlighted in the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Cyber Physical Systems, cyber ranges are moving from emerging technology to a vital operational tool. But to truly realize their value, you must move beyond generic, off-the-shelf labs and build a realistic environment to test your tools, train your teams, and validate your processes. 

The Challenges of CPS and OT Security

Securing CPS and OT environments comes with its own set of unique challenges, from skills gaps to increasing threats:

• More and diverse threats: Threats to CPS not only have a direct impact on critical infrastructure, like power and water, but their integration with IT systems has increased the attack surface, making them attractive targets for malware and attackers. Ransomware continues to be a major threat, like the Volt Typhoon attack against critical infrastructure organizations in the U.S., hitting communications, manufacturing, utility, transportation, construction, maritime, government, IT, and education all at once.
• Regulatory developments: Governments around the globe are imposing more stringent CPS security requirements aimed at elevating the baseline security posture of CPS environments across the world, recognizing their crucial role in the overall safety and reliability of infrastructure critical to society.
• The CPS security skills shortage: Traditional IT security skills are hard to come by, but OT and CPS security skills are even harder to find. Personnel with knowledge about industrial assets, protocols, processes, and control systems, who also stay up to date with the tools, techniques, and procedures related to modern attacks and security, are rare.

Why Cyber Range is the Answer for CPS and OT Security

The stakes for CPS security are incredibly high. Attacks are increasingly moving laterally from traditional enterprise IT systems into production and operational environments, such as manufacturing and critical infrastructure. At the same time, the number of disclosed vulnerabilities in CPS components is rising, providing more attack vectors for adversaries. This is a perfect storm of expanding risk.

A cyber range addresses this head-on by providing an intelligent, realistic proving ground. Just as pilots use flight simulators to build muscle memory for emergency procedures, your security and operational staff can use a cyber range to develop the skills needed to respond to real-world incidents. It’s where your team learns to fight before the actual fight begins.

Muscle Memory for Defenders

Training in a simulated environment allows security and operational teams to develop a coordinated, joint response to threats. Although training in a generic CPS virtual environment is beneficial, the real value is created when training is provided in a representative digital twin of the organization’s CPS world. You can run live-fire exercises that simulate multi-stage attacks, from the initial IT network compromise to the final lateral movement into your OT environment. This hands-on experience builds the muscle memory needed to react quickly and effectively when a real incident occurs, minimizing business disruption and downtime.

Validation for Your Tech Stack

In an IT environment, you can test a new security tool by throwing a few alerts at it. In an OT environment, that’s not an option. A cyber range allows you to safely and continuously test your entire security stack—EDR, SIEM, SOAR, and more—in a replica of your production environment. You can run “bakeoffs” to compare tools and measure their performance against realistic threats, ensuring you’re getting the most out of your security investments. This rationalizes your tech spend while improving your security posture.

Proving Readiness to Stakeholders

For CISOs and risk officers, proving security readiness is a top priority. A cyber range provides the data-driven evidence you need to validate your controls, test incident response playbooks, and demonstrate resilience to regulators and executives. You can run disaster recovery simulations to test business continuity plans, ensuring your organization can recover quickly from a catastrophic event.

How to Implement a Cyber Range for Your CPS Team

Implementing a cyber range isn’t a one-off project; it’s a strategic, recurring commitment to readiness. Here’s a three-step approach to get the most out of it:

1. Identify and align: Start by identifying the specific security training needs for both your cybersecurity and operational staff. It’s crucial to work with your CPS asset owners to create awareness that their staff are on the front lines and need to be trained. Without buy-in from these line managers, you may face resistance to dedicating staff time to activities they don’t see as directly linked to production.

2. Build a realistic simulation of your production environment: The true value of a cyber range for CPS is when it’s a representative digital twin of your actual environment, not a generic one. This is where you leverage a platform like SimSpace that can integrate detailed asset and traffic flow data from your existing CPS protection platforms to build a high-fidelity training environment. This level of realism ensures that the training and validation you perform are directly applicable to your unique attack surface. SimSpace excels at this, offering the ability to model your exact attack surface, run live-fire exercises, and test your technologies in a realistic replica of your production environments.
   
3. Validate and automate: Once your simulated environment is built, the real work begins. Use it to continuously validate your defenses. This goes beyond simple tabletop exercises and moves into live-fire, technical scenarios. The goal is to rigorously test incident response playbooks, measure coordination across roles, and validate every step of your response. Platforms with automated adversary emulation can help you do this continuously and at scale, proving that your security controls can prevent common attack techniques and strengthening your defenses against sophisticated threats.

With the SimSpace cyber range platform, our dedicated team creates a custom range that is a realistic simulation of your cyber-physical systems environment. We’ll walk you through every step of the above process and provide strategic direction based on your unique needs to help you get the most out of your cyber range.

To learn more about the value of cyber range for CPS security, get your complimentary copy of the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Cyber-Physical Systems Security, 2025.