The mining and heavy industry sectors also face an escalating wave of sophisticated cyber threats and severe connectivity vulnerabilities—isolated primary links in rural areas mean outages can instantly halt telemetry, weighing bridge applications and cloud-based supply chain systems, while a constant influx of contractors and suppliers requiring internet access adds risk. Without strict segmentation, a single infected contractor laptop could become a beachhead for lateral malware migration into critical operational systems, placing intense pressure on executives to safeguard OT and corporate networks under data protection regulation.