Cybersecurity Shouldn’t Suck – And Here’s What We’re Doing About It

Let’s be honest: cybersecurity has become overcomplicated, frustrating, and often ineffective—especially in the places that need it most.

Too many organizations are sinking time, money, and resources into tools that are clunky, disconnected, or difficult to manage. Instead of delivering protection, these systems often create confusion and friction. They drain resources, introduce hidden risks, and leave teams stretched thin without delivering the value they were promised.

Across my career—from chemical engineering and pharmaceuticals to Apple and even professional poker—I’ve learned that the best solutions are the ones people actually want to use. If security tools slow people down or make their jobs harder, they get ignored or worked around. And in OT environments where lives, productivity, and safety are on the line, that’s a risk no one can afford.

At BlastWave, we’re working to change that. Our mission is to transform cybersecurity for critical infrastructure by making it easy to use and hard to hack. We’re not layering on more complexity—we’re engineering it out. We help organizations eliminate entire risk categories rather than simply manage them. And we do it with tools that are intuitive, trusted by users in the field, and designed to support the way people actually work.

The Real Problem Isn’t the Technology. It’s Us.

The turning point for me came in 2016, reading about the Ukrainian electric grid hack. Having spent years inside manufacturing facilities and industrial control environments, I realized just how vulnerable these systems were. But it wasn’t just about outdated tech—it was about how humans interact with it.

Time and again, breaches happen not because of technical failure, but because of human behavior. Misconfigured firewalls. Passwords shared on sticky notes. Phishing emails. Security tools so clunky that operators bypass them just to get the job done.

We don’t need more tools. We need to design out risk. That’s a lesson I learned years ago in industrial safety programs—when you see recurring accidents or errors, the most effective solution isn’t to train people harder. It’s to remove the risk entirely by changing the environment.

That’s what we’re doing at BlastWave. We're not just mitigating risk—we’re eliminating entire risk categories.

How BlastWave Solves the Problem

That mindset of engineering risk out of the system is baked into everything we build. With BlastShield, we’ve created a cybersecurity solution purpose-built for OT environments—one that replaces layers of legacy tools with something radically simpler and far more effective.

Here’s how we remove friction and risk at the root:

• No passwords. We eliminate phishing and credential theft by removing the need for passwords entirely. Biometric authentication makes login effortless and secure.
  
  
• Network cloaking. We make your connected devices invisible—even to AI-driven scans and reconnaissance tools.
  
  
• Microsegmentation. Our software-defined segmentation isolates systems without complex reconfigurations.
  
  
• Secure remote access. No VPNs, no firewall gymnastics—just seamless access with zero attack surface.
  
  

By replacing your VPNs, firewalls, ACLs, data diodes, PAMs, and jump hosts, BlastShield eliminates clutter, cost, and complexity—while removing whole categories of risk vectors from your environment.

Real Results Across Critical Sectors

We’ve seen firsthand how this approach makes a difference:

• Manufacturing: One of our clients faced a $4.8M ransomware attack that shut down nine out of ten factory lines. The only line that kept running? The one protected by BlastShield.
  
  
• Cold Storage: We protect the largest refrigerated warehouse network in the U.S.—supporting over 35% of the nation’s food supply. Our solution ensured compliance and safety without disrupting operations.
  
  
• Oil & Gas, Water & Wastewater, Energy, Ports, Government, and Data Centers: We're helping leaders in these sectors redesign their risk landscape, not just manage it.

Even the Department of Defense is now using our technology to safeguard mission-critical systems with Zero Trust.

Why Trust is Everything

Too many security companies focus only on the tech. But at the heart of every effective cybersecurity program is trust—trust between teams, trust between users and systems, and trust that your tools will work when you need them most.

We built BlastWave to make cybersecurity feel less like a roadblock and more like a reliable partner. The goal is not to force people to work around friction—but to make security the easiest path forward.

If you work in food production, utilities, transportation, or any OT-heavy sector, you shouldn’t have to become a cybersecurity expert to protect your systems. That’s our job.

Want to Learn More?

I recently sat down with Kristin Demoranville on the Bites and Bytes Podcast to talk more about these ideas—why cybersecurity is broken, how we fix it, and what it really takes to protect critical infrastructure today.

You can listen to the full episode here:
Cybersecurity Shouldn’t Suck – Bites and Bytes Podcast

To learn more about how we’re helping teams simplify their security stack and design out risk, visit us at www.blastwave.com.

If you’re ready to see BlastShield in action, schedule a free demo and let us show you how simple and effective OT cybersecurity can truly be.