With attackers increasingly moving across IT and operational technology environments, the weakest point is often the boundary between the two. That’s the gap Trellix is aiming to close with
recent Network Detection and Response (NDR) updates that focus less on deep OT protocol decoding and more on how attacks traverse shared infrastructure, identities, and services.
The shift matters because most security teams still monitor IT and OT separately, even though attackers don’t respect that divide. When visibility breaks at the boundary, lateral movement becomes harder to detect, validate, and stop.
Complementing OT Tools, Not Replacing Them
OT teams already rely on specialized monitoring platforms, and Trellix isn’t trying to displace them. As Ravi Adireddi, Director of Product Management at Trellix, explains, “OT environments already rely on specialized tools for deep protocol awareness and asset visibility inside the OT network. Trellix NDR does not replace those tools; it complements them.”
Where NDR comes into play, he adds, is “at the IT-OT boundary across hybrid attack paths, where most real-world incidents unfold, and coverage is often fragmented.” Instead of duplicating OT tooling, Trellix is positioning NDR as the connective tissue that helps SOC teams understand how IT and OT events relate to each other during an active attack.
Seeing the Full Kill Chain Across IT and OT
That boundary focus shows up in how Trellix NDR correlates traffic. According to Adireddi, the platform “correlates North-South traffic from IT networks and East-West traffic across shared infrastructure, with OT traffic summaries from OT monitoring tools like Nozomi Networks to provide SOC teams with visibility into the full kill chain, not just isolated IT or OT alerts.”
He points out that this includes shared services such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, NTP, patching, and backup systems, along with credential misuse and DNS anomalies. The operational payoff is straightforward: “visibility into IT and OT assets and alerts on a single pane of glass, rather than across multiple consoles,” with the added benefit of applying Trellix machine-learning detections to OT network activity.
Turning Suspicion Into Evidence During Investigations
Lateral movement across IT and OT is a persistent concern, but proving it during investigations is often difficult. Adireddi says Trellix NDR is designed to remove that uncertainty: “It reduces the ambiguity, shortens investigation time, and replaces assumptions with evidence by correlating packet-level behavior, asset identity, and risk context across both domains.”
Instead of guessing, analysts can see “which IT asset initiated the contact via the gateway or jump host, which protocol was used, and against which OT asset,” while preserving timing, directionality, and protocol context. That evidence-based view helps teams prioritize what actually matters and avoid escalating low-risk noise.
Reducing OT Complexity for SOC Teams
Converging IT and OT visibility does introduce some overhead, especially for SOC teams without deep OT expertise. Adireddi acknowledges this, but notes that “Trellix NDR is explicitly designed to minimize OT-specific expertise requirements.” Behavioral baselining, correlation, and automated risk scoring across identity, endpoint, and network signals are used to suppress benign alerts and reduce analyst workload.
He’s also clear about current limits. “Many response steps remain manual due to safety, uptime, and regulatory constraints,” he says, emphasizing that this is a reality of OT environments rather than a platform shortcoming. Future automation is expected to expand, but cautiously.
Standardizing OT Security at MSSP Scale
For MSSPs managing multiple customers with mixed IT and OT maturity, consistency is critical. Haroon Malik, Product Manager at Trellix, frames the approach simply: “Trellix NDR does not introduce a separate OT SOC; it applies a single detection and investigation framework across North-South traffic IT to OT or OT to IT.”
OT signals are treated “as risk-weighted context and not raw protocol noise,” allowing analysts to use the same triage flow, severity logic, and MITRE mapping across customers. Malik adds that “alerts are normalized into threat behaviors, no per-customer tuning is required, and investigations and risk scoring are standardized across customers on the same console.”
The broader takeaway is that Trellix NDR is positioning OT not as a parallel security discipline, but as a risk-bearing extension of the enterprise attack surface. By focusing on the boundary where attacks actually progress, Trellix is aiming to make OT security operationally usable for SOC teams and MSSPs alike.
