Industrial control systems are often subject to high availability requirements. Under certain circumstances, malfunctions or technical failures might result in serious damage and high subsequent costs. For this reason, OT systems are often designed to be fail-safe.

If changes to such an environment are not carefully planned, coordinated, and tested in a realistic environment, there is the risk that logical or software-related errors will be overlooked and malfunctions will occur in the system. Even updates released by the manufacturer can cause malfunctions in the system when modifications are made or parameters adjusted.