Beyond Connectivity: Why BlastWave Just Made OT-Specific PAM Obsolete
In the world of Operational Technology (OT), "visibility" is usually a double-edged sword. You need to see your assets to manage them, but if the wrong person sees them, the consequences shift from downtime to disaster.
Today, I’m proud to announce a major evolution in our flagship product: Integrated Session Recording is now live within BlastAccess.
This isn't just another "feature." It is the final piece of the puzzle that allows industrial operators to move away from bloated, IT-centric Privileged Access Management (PAM) suites and embrace a lean, high-performance Zero Trust architecture built specifically for the plant floor.
The OT Mandate: Trust, but Verify (and Record)
Why does an OT operator care about session recording? It’s rarely about "spying" on employees. In high-stakes environments (water treatment, energy distribution, or chemical manufacturing), it’s about accountability and recovery.
- Compliance & Audit: Whether it’s NERC CIP, NIS2, or internal safety mandates, "who did what and when" is no longer optional.
- Root Cause Analysis: When a PLC stops communicating, or a setpoint is changed at 2:00 AM, you shouldn't have to guess what happened. Session recording provides a frame-by-frame forensic trail of the exact commands issued to the HMI.
- Third-Party Oversight: When an OEM vendor logs in remotely to patch a turbine or calibrate a sensor, you need eyes on the glass. Session recording ensures that "remote maintenance" stays within the agreed-upon scope.
The Performance Hurdle: The Peter Alm Advantage
The reason most OT environments avoid traditional session recording is simple: Overhead. Most PAM solutions are "heavy." They introduce latency that makes an HMI feel sluggish, or they consume so much bandwidth that they choke over the satellite or cellular WAN links commonly found in remote field sites (think oil rigs or rural substations). If the recording lag causes an operator to miss a critical alarm, the security tool itself becomes a safety hazard.
To solve this, we leveraged the unique talents of Peter Alm, our CTO and a world-class coder known for squeezing maximum performance out of lean code.
Peter didn't just "add a recording module." He engineered a high-efficiency capture engine that minimizes CPU overhead and optimizes data compression. The result? BlastAccess Session Recording runs seamlessly over low-bandwidth WAN links. You get high-fidelity visual logs without sacrificing the sub-millisecond responsiveness required for real-time industrial control.
The End of the "OT PAM" Workaround
For a long time, OT teams were forced into a compromise. They would use a VPN for connectivity, an MFA tool for identity, and then bolt on a massive PAM solution just to get session recording and vaulting. It was a "Franken-stack" that was expensive to maintain and complex to manage.
With this release, that compromise is over. BlastAccess now handles the entire lifecycle of a privileged OT session:
- Identity: Biometric MFA and cryptographic identity verification.
- Invisibility: Cloaking the asset so it’s invisible to the public internet.
- Access: Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) microsegmentation.
- Accountability: High-performance, WAN-optimized session recording.
By integrating these capabilities into a single, high-performance binary, we’ve eliminated the need for a separate PAM solution for OT secure remote access. You get better security, lower latency, and a significantly reduced total cost of ownership.
The Mission Continues
At BlastWave, our goal has always been to simplify the complex. By bringing session recording into the fold, we are giving OT operators the power to prove exactly what happened on their networks without the heavy footprint of traditional IT tools.
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The future of privileged OT access is not another bloated stack. It is invisible infrastructure, verified users, recorded sessions, and secure access built for the plant floor.
– Tom Sego, CEO, BlastWave
After an IT breach, Nucor shut down steel production to make sure the attackers couldn't move from IT to OT networks. BlastWave's microsegmentation would have kept them completely isolated.
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