HONEYWELL’S 2026 OT Cybersecurity Benchmark Report identifies a gap between industrial organisations’ confidence in their operational technology (OT) security and their practical visibility. The survey of 603 leaders across energy, oil and gas, healthcare, maritime and manufacturing organisations in the Americas, EMEA and APAC found that 88% considered their OT security programmes mature or design-led, but only 21% maintained a complete OT asset inventory.
Just 33% said OT was fully integrated into a centralised security operations centre, while 20% continuously monitored more than three-quarters of connected IoT devices.
Respondents that had experienced a significant OT security incident reported an average of 16.2 hours of downtime. Among affected organisations, 21% estimated costs of more than $100,000 per hour, and 4% reported potential losses exceeding $500,000 per hour. Incident reporting varied by sector: 91% of energy and utilities respondents and 87% of maritime respondents said they had experienced a significant incident in the previous 12 months, compared with 54% in oil and gas. In healthcare, only 19% said facility and building systems were fully integrated into cybersecurity monitoring and protection.
AI adoption is widespread, with 99% expecting it to affect OT security operations within the next two to three years. Current uses include threat detection (72%), continuous monitoring (68%) and asset inventory (59%). However, only 23% use autonomous or agentic AI for threat detection, indicating that most deployments still assist human analysts.
Honeywell said organisations moving towards automated action will need defined decision rights, human oversight and testing that accounts for possible effects on uptime, equipment and safety.