We started Dragos on a simple belief: our communities deserve to be protected from cyber threats. Operational technology is what runs infrastructure such as our electric grids, water systems, refineries, data centers, ports, and mines. When it fails or is attacked, it isn’t just downtime. It’s a blackout, a contaminated water supply, a plant that stops running. To me, that has always meant real people: families losing power, communities losing access to clean water. As these systems have gotten more complex and more connected, the consequences of failure have only gotten more severe.
Today marks a major milestone in our mission to safeguard civilization. Dragos has acquired NetRise and runZero, a move that coincides with the close of Accenture’s majority investment in Dragos.
As we continue to build an independent, 100+ year company, I’ve been elevated to the role of chairman of the board in addition to CEO. We will continue to work with partners that are in our customers’ best interests, because that neutrality is what this mission requires. We chose Accenture as a majority investor because they understand that as well as we do, while also providing the global reach and services that help bring Dragos to anywhere the mission calls us.
OT has always been about the digital systems that influence physical processes, not about where a system sits in the organization or which operating system it runs. For a long time, the industry tried to draw hard lines between systems anyway, placing OT into specific layers of the Purdue model or defining it by operating system. That was never really what the mission was about. The cloud-connected analytics platform running a manufacturing process, the cooling and power systems keeping a data center’s servers online, and the cloud-connected SCADA used to service electrical substations, are all part of your operational environment whether you classify them that way or not. We call this extended operational technology, or xOT: to highlight that whatever systems can impact physical processes are in scope to be protected. It’s the reality of today’s environment and the target of adversaries looking to do harm with maximum impact.
To build the right platform for xOT, we found people and companies who had solved hard problems customers cared about:
runZero, led by HD Moore who is one of the most recognized names in security, brings exposure management across IT, IoT, and OT, consolidating asset and risk intelligence from any source into a single view, so defenders always know where they’re exposed.
NetRise, founded by Thomas Pace and Michael Scott, looks inside the software running on OT devices to find hidden vulnerabilities before they’re exploited. The reality is most OT teams don’t really know what’s running inside the devices on their network. NetRise shows them.
Earlier this year, we acquired Phosphorus to handle automated discovery and remediation for the billions of connected devices that have reshaped how critical infrastructure operates. They close the loop between finding a problem and fixing it at this scale.
Together, Dragos, NetRise, runZero, and Phosphorus carry out the mission better than ever before. Defenders have one place to see everything in their xOT environment, understand what’s running on it, and stop what’s targeting it.
Additionally, all of these technologies will continually enhance the Dragos Intelligence Fabric, which is the decade of OT-specific telemetry and incident response insights that already power the Dragos Platform. Dragos EmberAI, the AI we built specifically for OT, gets sharper with every new signal these acquisitions bring into the Intelligence Fabric, giving analysts faster answers and better guidance. As the platform gets smarter, so does every defender who relies on it.
If you’re a Dragos customer or partner, you’ll see the pace and depth of what we deliver increase, because we have the people, the technology, and the partner ecosystem to do more for you, faster. We’re taking the new capital and investing in R&D, with over 100 positions open and hundreds more to come. The majority of those positions will be in R&D, to make sure our technology platform outpaces our customers’ needs, not just delivers after the need. Phosphorus integration is already underway, and in the coming months, we’ll share more on how NetRise and runZero integrate into the Dragos Platform.
If you’re a NetRise or runZero customer, welcome to Dragos. Know you’ll continue to get the solutions and service you have come to expect, while also getting a better-resourced version of the product you already chose, backed by a company that’s going to keep investing in it. And if your environment extends into OT, you now have more options to leverage Dragos if that’s helpful to you.
The threat to operational environments will only accelerate. State-backed actors are growing more capable, less sophisticated actors are leveraging AI to unlock deficits, and AI that organizations are adding to their own operational environments for productivity are also increasing risk. We are expanding to xOT cybersecurity to put defenders back in control.
Join me, HD Moore, and Thomas Pace on October 19 for a webinar to learn more about why we are so excited about our roadmap as NetRise and runZero enhance to the Dragos Platform.
