The manufacturing industry is undergoing a rapid digital transformation, leveraging IoT (Internet of Things), robotics, AI, data analytics, and cloud computing technologies to enhance productivity and efficiency. However, this digital shift into smart factories challenges data security, compliance, and risk management.

According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach in manufacturing was $5.56 million, up from $4.73 million U.S. dollars in 2023. The manufacturing sector needs to evolve its cybersecurity strategy as it continues evolving technologically to overcome its unique cybersecurity challenges and reduce the impact of cyberattacks and data breaches.

In addition to protecting against cyber attacks, manufacturing must comply with increasing data privacy and regulatory requirements. Compliance with data protection and privacy regulations ensures the security of sensitive data, reducing regulatory costs and risks for manufacturers.

These are the specific data privacy and security regulations that impact the manufacturing industry:

U.S. Regulations:

International Regulations:

  • GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation – EU): Regulates personal data collection and processing for manufacturers operating in or selling to the EU.
  • PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act – Canada): Governs data protection for Canadian businesses.
  • PIPL (Personal Information Protection Law – China): Imposes strict controls on data collection and cross-border transfers for companies operating in China.

Industry-Specific Standards:

  • ISO 27001: International standard for information security management systems (ISMS).
  • ISA/IEC 62443: Cybersecurity framework for securing industrial automation and control systems (IACS).
  • TISAX (Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange – Automotive): Industry-specific security standard for automotive manufacturers and suppliers.
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Types of Data Relevant to the Manufacturing Industry

The industry is under tremendous pressure to establish cyber resilience, and safeguarding valuable data assets is the first step.

Here are some common types of data that manufacturers must protect:

  • Intellectual Property (IP): Trade secrets, patents, proprietary formulas, and design blueprints.
  • Product & Engineering Data: CAD files, technical specifications, and R&D documents.
  • Supply Chain & Logistics Data: Vendor contracts, shipping details, and inventory records.
  • Customer & Supplier Information: PII (Personally Identifiable Information), contact details, and business agreements.
  • Financial Data: Revenue reports, cost structures, and transactional records.
  • Operational Technology (OT) Data: IoT sensor data, machine performance metrics, and factory automation logs.
  • Employee Data: HR records, payroll information, and personally identifiable employee details.
  • Compliance & Regulatory Data: Documentation related to industry standards (e.g., ISO, NIST, GDPR, CCPA).
  • Incident & Security Logs: Cybersecurity logs, access records, and vulnerability assessments.
  • Marketing & Sales Data: Customer engagement analytics, pricing models, and sales forecasts.

Manufacturing Industry Challenges in Data Security & Compliance

With the rapid expansion of digital operations and the manufacturing sector’s vital role in the global supply chain, it has become the top target for cybercriminals in recent years. In 2024, manufacturing accounted for 25.7% of all cyber-attacks across industry sectors, making it particularly vulnerable to ransomware, intellectual property theft, and supply chain disruptions. Strengthening cybersecurity frameworks within this sector is crucial to mitigating these risks.

1. Expanding Data Footprint

The adoption of IoT and an interconnected web of distributed systems, often supporting plant automation, generate massive volumes of data, making data management complex. Unstructured and structured data spread across cloud, and on-premises environments increases security risks and creates a large attack surface.

2. Complex Data Ecosystem

Manufacturers often have intricate data ecosystems, including legacy systems, cloud-based applications, and third-party data sharing. The reliance on older systems that contain exploitable, unpatched security vulnerabilities increases the risk of data breaches.

3. Intellectual Property (IP) Protection

Manufacturers handle sensitive designs, patents, and proprietary information. Unauthorized access or data leaks can lead to the loss of revenue, and it becomes a competitive disadvantage.

4. Compliance & Regulatory Challenges

Strict regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific compliance requirements demand rigorous data protection. Failure to comply can result in substantial fines and reputational damage.

5. Third-Party & Supply Chain Risks

Manufacturing relies on extensive supplier networks, which increases exposure to third-party vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is critical to ensure secure data sharing to safeguard the supply chain and reduce the risk of disruptions due to cyberattacks on vendors and partners.

6. Cybersecurity Threats

The rise in ransomware attacks and data breaches has become the leading cyber threat to manufacturing, threatening operational continuity, increasing downtime, and boosting costs. Additionally, insider threats and misconfigured access controls further expose sensitive data.

See BigID Next in Action

BigID Helps Global Retail and Manufacturers Automate Privacy, Security, and Compliance [Case Study]

A global retail and manufacturing brand uses BigID to find, discover, and classify all sensitive, critical, and personal data across complex environments. This supports secure M&A activities, boosts global audits for compliance, and provides a “privacy-first” approach to accelerate data governance and security initiatives. With BigID, this retail and manufacturing brand was able to:

  • Create a Holistic Data Inventory: Automatically build and maintain a data inventory to discover dark data, PI, and PII and serve as the single source of truth for privacy and governance initiatives.
  • Acceleration of a Secure Cloud Migration: Cleaning up and validating that the right data is moving to Workday from the prior HR platform – ensuring no unnecessary data was transferred.
  • Validate M&A Data Transfers: Ensure that only the right data, including customer or IP data, is shared and transferred after a division is sold.
  • Reduce Insider Risk: Verify and implement the proper controls around sensitive data to prevent unauthorized external access and use, reducing insider risk.

How BigID Helps Manufacturers Protect Data, Reduce Risk, and Achieve Compliance

BigID empowers manufacturers with advanced data discovery, compliance automation, and risk mitigation, ensuring data integrity and operational resilience. By leveraging BigID’s AI-driven capabilities, manufacturers can gain complete visibility into critical business data, protect sensitive information, manage risk, streamline compliance, and safeguard their business against evolving cyber threats.

With BigID’s security-by-design approach, you can:

  • Discover Your Data: Discover and catalog your sensitive data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured – in on-prem environments and across the cloud.
  • Know Your Data: Automatically classify, categorize, tag, and label sensitive data with unmatched accuracy, granularity, and scale.
  • Improve Data Security Posture: Proactively prioritize and target data risks and automate data security posture management (DSPM).
  • Remediate Data Your Way: Manage data remediation and delegate to stakeholders, open tickets, or make API calls across your tech stack.
  • Enable Zero Trust: Reduce overprivileged access and overexposed data and streamline access rights management to enable zero trust.
  • Mitigate Insider Risk: Proactively monitor, detect, and respond to unauthorized internal exposure, use, and suspicious activity related to sensitive data.
  • Reduce Your Attack Surface: Shrink the attack surface by proactively eliminating unnecessary, non-business critical sensitive data.
  • Assess Supply Chain Risk: Automate vendor assessments and monitoring to evaluate the security posture of third-party vendors, reduce third-party risk, and verify that all vendors adhere to security and data protection standards.
  • Secure Your Cloud Migration: Optimize cloud migrations with data-driven insight and compliance, automatically reduce redundant data, and move the data that matters most.
  • Streamline Data Breach Response: Quickly and accurately detect and investigate breach impact, facilitate prompt incident response, and notify relevant authorities and affected students and staff.
  • Accelerate AI Security: BigID efficiently builds policies to govern AI based on privacy, sensitivity, regulation, and access to control the data shared with LLMs and AI applications. Use AI with responsible guardrails to manage and protect proprietary information, intellectual property, and trade secrets.
  • Achieve Compliance: Automate compliance with end-to-end privacy and security capabilities and frameworks to protect personal, sensitive, and regulated data.

Schedule a 1:1 demo with one of our data security experts today to see how BigID can transform data security and compliance for manufacturers.