Podcast: Industrial Cybersecurity Insider
Episode: OT Cybersecurity: Is the Purdue Model Still Useful?
Pub date: 2026-05-12
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Is the Purdue Model outdated, or simply misunderstood? In this episode, Dino sits down with Ken Kully (Rockwell Automation) for a candid, practitioner-level conversation about what the Purdue Model still gets right.
They discuss where it falls short in modern environments, and why “IT/OT convergence” remains more of a people-and-process challenge than a technology problem.
They break down the reality on the plant floor: long-lived legacy systems, inconsistent architectures across sites, limited maintenance windows, and the operational consequences of downtime.
The discussion also tackles the everyday friction points: MFA, shared operator accounts, unmanaged vendor laptops, and remote access “surprises”, and why you can’t improve OT security posture without a trustworthy asset inventory and segmentation that keeps systems “in their lane.”
Chapters:
(00:00:00) Intro + why this Purdue conversation matters now
(00:01:00) Ken’s background: from process environments to OT cyber delivery readiness
(00:04:00) The big question: has the Purdue Model outlived its usefulness?
(00:07:00) Framework vs. strict blueprint: “Purdue enough” in real plants
(00:09:00) IT/OT convergence: why it’s a people + process problem (not tech)
(00:12:00) The “silver tsunami” and why security UX fails on the plant floor
(00:15:30) MFA, shared logins, and why “security gets in the way” still shows up
(00:18:00) Legacy reality: Windows 98/7 boxes, vendor lock-in, and downtime economics
(00:21:00) Discovery first: diagrams, configs, and why documentation is always missing
(00:23:30) Purdue as a map: brokering traffic, one-up/one-down, and the “3.5” DMZ
(00:26:00) When devices try to “escape the box”: unexpected outbound comms + exposure risk
(00:28:30) Vendor/OEM access: the unmanaged laptop problem in OT
(00:32:00) Asset inventory as the unlock: you can’t defend what you don’t know exists
(00:34:00) Why IT often won’t “crawl the plant,” and what that means operationally
(00:36:30) Scale problem: 30 plants, 30 realities—standardize globally, execute locally
(00:38:30) The SI/OEM “third leg”: why trusted integrators are key to sustainable OT security
(00:40:30) Closing + crossover: continuing the discussion on Ken’s OT After Hours podcast
Links And Resources:
Kenneth Kully on LinkedIn
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