When cyber risk can stop production, security has to protect more than data.
Droptine helps operators and energy-sector companies reduce exposure across remote access, vendors, field devices, and the connections between office IT and operational systems — without disrupting the work that pays for everything.
30 minutes. We'll ask about your operation before we say a word about ours.
The assumption that aged out
For years, the comfort was: "Our operational systems are separate. A problem in the office can't reach the field."
Then came remote monitoring. Vendor support logins. Cloud dashboards for pumpers. Field laptops that connect to both worlds. Shared networks nobody fully diagrammed. The separation most operators count on hasn't been fully true for years. It eroded one convenient connection at a time.
None of those connections was a mistake. Each one made the operation faster or cheaper to run. But every one is also a path, and a path doesn't care which direction traffic moves.
The riskiest access point usually isn't a server. It's a path nobody owns.
Remote access
Useful, necessary, and the first thing to review. Who can connect? From where? Is it logged? Was the access for that integrator ever turned off — or is it still live because nobody's job was to turn it off?
Vendors and contractors
Every service company, integrator, and support contract is also a credential into your environment. Vendor access tends to accumulate: granted for one job, kept "just in case," forgotten by everyone except the systems that still honor it.
The IT/OT seam
We're careful with claims here, and you should demand that from anyone you talk to: securing live operational systems is specialized work that has to be scoped around uptime and safety. Where Droptine starts is the seam — the corporate accounts, endpoints, and network paths that an attacker would use to get anywhere near operational systems in the first place.
Field devices
A field laptop on a public network, a tablet shared across crews, a workstation in a yard office running an OS from two administrations ago. Endpoints in energy travel. Protection has to travel with them.
Backups and recovery
When something does go wrong, the difference between a bad day and a bad month is whether recovery actually works. Backups need to be protected from the same attack they're meant to survive, and tested against realistic downtime numbers rather than assumed.
Security that respects operations
A security vendor who doesn't understand operations will happily create the downtime you hired them to prevent.
We don't bolt monitoring agents onto sensitive systems without scoping. We don't push changes during critical operations. We don't treat a producing asset like an office network. The sequence is: understand the environment, control the riskiest access paths, and improve from there — at the pace the operation can absorb.
No one can promise perfect security. What you can reasonably demand is fewer blind spots, tightly controlled access, and a documented plan — so when something does get through, nobody is making decisions cold.
What working with Droptine covers
- Remote access review: every path in, who holds it, whether it's still needed
- Vendor and contractor access controls — limited, logged, and time-bound
- Identity and MFA across corporate systems
- Endpoint protection for office and field devices
- Network segmentation between corporate and operational environments, scoped carefully
- Email security for the accounts that approve payments and reset passwords
- Backup protection and tested recovery planning
- Incident response planning: who acts, in what order, before it's ever needed
- Framework alignment where it applies
The Droptine plan, for operations
Find the exposure
Every external path into the environment gets diagrammed — users, vendors, corporate IT, operational systems, and the connections that grew up informally and never made it onto a network map.
Lock down what matters
Risk gets ranked by operational consequence. A gap that could touch production outranks a dozen findings that couldn't. You see the ranking and the reasoning.
Maintain the program
Vendors rotate, projects end, access lingers. We keep watching: monitoring, access reviews, documentation, and a program that stays current as the operation changes.
Signs it's time
- Nobody can produce a current list of who has remote access.
- Vendor logins outlive vendor contracts.
- Field laptops and office machines live on the same flat network.
- Backups exist, but a full restore has never been rehearsed.
- The incident plan is "call whoever set this up."
- A customer, partner, or insurer just asked security questions that took weeks to answer.
If a customer or insurer sent you a security questionnaire, that's a scope we can move on quickly: answer it accurately first, then close the gaps it exposed. It's one of the most common ways operators start with us — and one of the fastest.
Common questions
Do you work on OT systems directly?
We start at the seam — the corporate systems, access paths, and endpoints attackers use to reach operational environments. Work that touches OT directly gets scoped carefully and separately, with uptime and safety as hard constraints. Anyone who promises to "secure your SCADA" in week one should worry you.
Will security work interrupt operations?
Not if it's sequenced right. Assessment is observation, not intervention. And changes don't happen without a communication and approval plan: you'll know what's changing, when, and who to call — before anything reaches the field.
Can you help with vendor access specifically?
Yes. It's often the first project, and often the fastest win. We inventory every external path in, match each one to a current business need, and close the rest. Most operators are surprised by the list.
We have an IT provider. Where do you fit?
Your IT person's job is keeping things running, and we're not here to make them nervous — they stay in the loop, not in the dark. Our job is different: knowing every path into your environment, watching it, and being accountable when that list is wrong. Most operators have someone doing the first job and nobody doing the second.
How do we start?
One conversation. We'll ask about your operation, your remote access, your vendors, and what prompted the call. If there's a fit, the first step is usually a focused exposure review — scoped, priced, and scheduled around your operation.
Close the paths before they get used.
Your operation depends on connections that made sense one at a time. Let's look at what they add up to — and lock down the ones that matter.