9pm Teams invite. War room. The kind of notification a risk manager never wants to see.

A ransom note. A demand for a cryptocurrency I had never heard of. One facility hit. Cost of downtime: roughly $1,500 a minute.

That number is the whole story of manufacturing security in one line.

We obsess over control coverage, not control integrity. If someone applied the right pressure to your strongest control tomorrow — would it hold?

Let’s cut through the sanitized language and get straight to it: most companies treat IT Asset Management (ITAM) like flossing. Everyone swears they do it. Few actually do. And when they do, it’s usually in a panic, right after something’s on fire — usually figuratively, sometimes literally.