Fortune 500 Food Manufacturer Deploys Unified Cybersecurity Across 46 Global Sites

Over two decades of aggressive acquisition, this Fortune 500 consumer food manufacturer assembled a portfolio of dozens of food brands—each inheriting its own technology stack and security posture. The result was 46 global manufacturing sites operating with no centralized, real-time view into cybersecurity risk. In food and beverage, where OT systems control production lines, refrigeration, and quality monitoring, a breach affecting industrial control systems can halt production and trigger costly recalls. Without a unified threat management strategy, the company was effectively blind to vulnerabilities at the IT/OT boundary across its entire global footprint.

Rockwell Automation partnered with industrial cybersecurity specialist Claroty to deploy centralized threat detection services across all 46 manufacturing sites. The implementation used predictive ML to establish an organization-wide baseline of normal network activity, enabling continuous monitoring that could surface anomalous behavior indicative of an attack—without disrupting production operations. Rather than reacting to breaches after the fact, the ML-driven system identifies threat signals early, allowing security teams to intervene before incidents escalate. A custom workflow was built for breach recovery to ensure compromised systems could be isolated and restored consistently. Alongside the technical deployment, Rockwell Automation implemented an enterprise-wide employee cybersecurity training program to address the human layer of security risk.

The manufacturer achieved what had previously been unattainable across its sprawling acquisition portfolio: a single, unified view of cybersecurity risk spanning all 46 global sites. Key outcomes include:

• Centralized threat management across IT and OT environments, replacing siloed, site-by-site security programs
• Improved OT visibility, with security teams now able to monitor industrial control systems alongside traditional IT infrastructure
• Faster threat response, enabled by real-time detection and a standardized recovery workflow
• Scalable security foundation that can absorb future acquisitions without requiring site-by-site security rebuilds

The shift from reactive incident response to continuous monitoring eliminated the exposure window that previously left the company's production systems vulnerable.

• Post-acquisition security debt compounds quickly—a centralized threat detection platform should be a standard integration requirement in M&A diligence for manufacturers.
• OT/IT convergence is the primary attack surface in food and beverage; any cybersecurity program that treats these as separate domains will have blind spots.
• Establishing a network activity baseline with predictive ML enables proactive threat detection without halting or disrupting production workflows.
• Employee training is not optional—technical controls alone are insufficient if plant-floor staff cannot recognize or report suspicious activity.
• Standardized breach recovery workflows ensure consistent, repeatable response across distributed global sites.