The Operational Technology Exposure Budget: A Business Value Model for Industrial Connectivity Decisions

Abstract: Industrial organizations increasingly connect operational technology (OT) to enterprise analytics, remote access platforms, maintenance systems, cloud services, and artificial intelligence pipelines. These connections may provide operational visibility, but they can also create control-path exposure in systems that monitor or control physical processes. This paper proposes the Operational Technology Exposure Budget, a design-science decision model for evaluating whether OT connectivity and industrial data flows are justified by measurable business value. The model separates business-value scoring from exposure-burden scoring and classifies connectivity decisions into four outcomes: approve, re-architect, reduce, or remove. Using public OT security guidance, secure-connectivity principles, data governance literature, AI-in-OT guidance, and synthetic industrial connectivity scenarios, the paper demonstrates how organizations can preserve useful telemetry while minimizing unnecessary exposure. The contribution is a practical engineering-management artifact that challenges unjustified OT connectivity before organizations attempt to secure it after the fact.

Keywords: business value, industrial connectivity, industrial control systems, operational technology, OT exposure budget, telemetry governance