The Operational-Technology Layer of the Facility
Treat the data center as two machines wearing one skin. The compute fabric is what tenants pay for; the operational-technology plant is what keeps it alive. Chillers, switchgear, pumps, and the controllers that sequence them are not IT accessories — they are a real-time industrial system with its own protocols, its own failure modes, and its own adversaries. The mistake that kills you is filing OT under "building maintenance" and defending it with IT reflexes. Availability, not confidentiality, is the OT crown jewel. A tripped breaker or a spoofed temperature reading can strand a hundred megawatts of GPUs faster than any data breach. Reason about the plant as a controllable, attackable machine, or you are defending half the building.
Knowledge check
Why can OT controls not simply inherit the same security posture applied to enterprise IT systems?
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Because OT prioritizes availability and safety over confidentiality, runs deterministic real-time processes on long-lived legacy hardware, and often speaks unauthenticated industrial protocols that break when treated with IT reflexes like forced patching, active scanning, or reboots.