Cybersplice has established Cybersplice UK Ltd, expanding its OT (operational technology) cybersecurity activities into the U.K. market, with an initial focus on manufacturing and industrial environments. The U.K. operation is introducing Rapid OT Security Visibility, delivered through the Splice platform, to help organisations discover OT assets, understand communications, identify behaviours and outliers, expose potential cyber-physical risks and establish greater visibility and context across their OT environments.
For many industrial organisations, the first challenge is not deciding which security technology to deploy. It is establishing a reliable picture of what is already operating across the environment.
Legacy and modern systems can coexist alongside interconnected operational processes where changes must be approached carefully. Cybersplice UK therefore starts with visibility, giving organisations a practical basis for understanding their OT environment before deciding where further investigation or security measures are appropriate.
Rapid OT Security Visibility addresses five questions: what is connected by discovering OT assets, what is communicating by understanding communications and relationships, what is happening by identifying behaviors and outliers, where cyber-physical risk could exist by providing context around activity affecting industrial processes and physical operations, and what the environment looks like as a whole by giving engineering, operational and security stakeholders greater visibility and context to support informed decision-making.
“Visibility is an important first step in understanding OT security risk,” said Dietmar Kilian, managing director of Cybersplice UK Ltd. “Before organisations can make informed decisions about securing an OT environment, they need to understand what is there, how it is communicating and what is changing. Our approach is designed to make that first step practical.”
The approach reflects a principle that has been central to Cybersplice since its origins: OT security needs to account for the realities of the operational environment, rather than treating industrial systems as conventional IT assets.
Cybersplice’s origins trace back to 2013, when a cybersecurity consulting team encountered a CT scanner connected to a hospital network. Its publicly available manual contained an administrator password, along with instructions advising users not to change it.
The discovery highlighted a wider security gap: operational equipment was increasingly connected to IT networks without the same security assumptions or requirements as conventional IT systems. That experience catalysed the development of an approach focused specifically on OT cybersecurity and the potential real-world consequences of cyberattacks on operational environments.
Splice technology development began in 2015, followed by the first proof-of-concept deployment in 2017. Cybersplice (Pty) Ltd was incorporated in 2018 as a dedicated go-to-market company for Splice in Southern Africa, with paying customers from its first year. From the outset, the objective was to reduce cyber-physical risk and help prevent cyberattacks against OT environments from creating real-world operational consequences.
That experience also influenced the design philosophy behind Splice. Rather than assuming that OT systems could be secured using conventional IT approaches, Cybersplice focused on environments where patching, replacing equipment, or redesigning networks may not always be practical. Splice therefore incorporates capabilities including vulnerability shielding and encrypted overlay networking, designed to help protect operational assets while allowing organisations to continue operating legacy systems.
OT environments prioritise safety, reliability, and availability, creating conditions where patching, hardening, equipment replacement, or network redesign may not always be practical. Splice combines asset discovery and visibility, behavioural profiling and anomaly detection, secure remote access, identity shielding, network isolation and vulnerability shielding through an encrypted overlay network.
The technology is designed for environments where vulnerable OT equipment may need to remain in operation. Vulnerability shielding can provide an additional layer of protection without necessarily requiring costly replacement of legacy equipment.
Cybersplice’s experience includes the City of Cape Town Smart City Infrastructure, where Splice has been used for OT asset discovery, monitoring, anomaly detection and network protection across transportation, surveillance and facilities infrastructure.
Another long-running deployment is with Two-a-Day, an organisation in South Africa’s agriculture and food-processing sector, where Splice has been used to protect PLC networks supporting cold-chain operations through encrypted overlay networking, monitoring, visibility and protection.
Additional international projects have included manufacturing in Spain, mining in South Africa, oil and gas in Morocco, packaging manufacturing in South Africa, and food and beverage operations in Namibia. These projects have included OT network asset discovery and behavioural profiling, with some involving international partners and remote infrastructure deployments. The identities of these organisations remain confidential.
This experience provides exposure to different industrial processes, geographical environments and deployment models while maintaining the confidentiality requirements of the organisations involved.
Cybersplice also participated in Project Orthos, a UK defence innovation programme focused on reducing cyber attack surfaces in Operational Technology environments. Working alongside international partners, Cybersplice contributed its OT cybersecurity expertise and technology to demonstrate methods for protecting military cyber-physical systems from attack.
The project was developed in response to the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) “Reducing the Cyber Attack Surface” (RCAS) innovation programme.
Cybersplice UK brings this accumulated experience into a focused UK market entry, beginning with manufacturing and the wider industrial and engineering community.
Rapid OT Security Visibility provides the initial point of engagement: helping organisations discover connected assets, understand communications, identify changes and behaviours, and establish clearer context around potential cyber-physical risk.
“Our UK launch is deliberately focused on a practical starting point,” said Kilian. “We are bringing experience developed through years of working with operational technology environments to the UK industrial and engineering community, beginning with the fundamental challenge of understanding what is actually happening within the OT environment.”
