OT Mergers and Acquisitions Without the Pain

Post-acquisition, stakeholder priorities often diverge. For instance, corporate leadership pushes for enterprise-wide dashboards and standardized KPIs, finance focuses on performance trending and ROI visibility, reliability teams seek unified operational analytics across assets, and security insists that integration introduces zero additional exposure. Balancing these competing demands makes integration both critical and complex.

Traditional OT integration approaches can be slow and introduce significant risk. Direct network connections increase the likelihood of cross-contamination, while trust relationships, routing, and identity integration can create new attack paths. Challenges such as overlapping IP spaces and domains often lead to disruptive re-IP efforts or complex network address translation schemes.

A diode-based approach provides a cleaner, streamlined alternative that enables organizations to integrate data without connecting networks.

Organizations can extract historian and process data from an acquired environment, such as PI systems or OPC-UA sources, while: 

• Keeping each network operationally independent  
• Avoiding immediate re-IP, domain trust, and routing redesign  
• Reducing the chance that one environment’s compromise becomes the other environment’s incident  

This model aligns with established OT security best practices, particularly the use of unidirectional gateways and data diodes. These technologies enable strictly controlled, one-way data flows, ensuring that only authorized information is transmitted while preventing upstream threats or lateral movement between networks. 

In some acquisitions, the target has modern OPC UA aggregation but inconsistent or incompatible historian practices. With MetaDefender Netwall, you can still safely transfer data for integration into your PI ecosystem by leveraging its OPC UA connector and using the AVEVA PI connector for OPC UA. This connector is designed to copy OPC UA contextual time-series data into the PI ecosystem. 

A diode-based use case is particularly valuable in the early stages of OT M&A integration because it enables organizations to begin extracting value without immediately incurring risk. By avoiding the need for direct network integration, companies can maintain stability in acquired operations while still gaining access to critical data.

At the same time, security teams can apply a “quarantine and observe” mindset, monitoring the acquired environment, assessing risks, and identifying vulnerabilities before deeper integration. This approach does not limit future flexibility. Organizations retain the option to fully integrate networks later. This can be implemented after completing asset inventory, system hardening, and remediation.