Xona Systems’ Platform v5.5 Tackles the OT Remote Access Problem That Everyone Ignores Until It’s Too Late

There’s a quiet assumption embedded in most remote access security architectures: the network will be there when you need it. For enterprise IT environments — office buildings, data centers, cloud infrastructure with redundant fiber — that assumption holds up most of the time. For critical infrastructure, it’s a fantasy.

On February 23, 2026, Xona Systems announced Platform v5.5, a release that addresses something the OT security industry has danced around for years: the fundamental incompatibility between how legacy secure access tools work and how industrial environments actually operate. The headline capability is Session Hold and RDP Auto-Reconnect — mechanisms that maintain session continuity across network disruptions without compromising security controls or expanding the attack surface. The deeper story, though, is what this release reveals about the state of OT security more broadly.

What Xona Actually Announced

Platform v5.5 does several things worth unpacking. The Session Hold and RDP Auto-Reconnect capabilities preserve operational state and session integrity across transient connectivity loss, allowing technicians on offshore platforms, rural substations, or bandwidth-constrained industrial sites to continue time-sensitive work without forced disconnections, reauthentication loops, or loss of progress. The platform adds configurable time synchronization services and enhanced CLI tooling for constrained environments, along with hardened FIPS-compliant cryptographic behavior — all of which matter deeply for customers navigating NERC CIP, IEC 62443, or TSA SD2 compliance.

On the governance side, Xona expanded its Centralizer into a genuine single-pane-of-glass management layer — centralized control over session recordings, real-time logs, bandwidth metrics, connection structures, and policy enforcement across all connected Xona Gateways. The platform deepens its integrations with Forescout, Nozomi Networks, and Radiflow. Users now also get concurrent RDP, SSH, and Web sessions with an upgraded secure session transfer workflow designed for shift handoffs and OEM collaboration scenarios.

Deployed across more than 40 countries in energy, utilities, manufacturing, and maritime sectors, Xona positions v5.5 as the culmination of a shift it’s been executing for several years: from “secure access tool” to “OT access governance platform.”

The Real Problem This Solves (And Why It Took This Long)

The OT security community has spent a decade talking about the Purdue Model, network segmentation, and zero trust architectures. It has spent considerably less time grappling with an awkward truth: when a security control creates enough operational friction, operators bypass it. Not because they’re careless, but because they’re trying to keep a power grid running or avoid a production shutdown, and the tool the security team installed keeps dropping their session at the worst possible moment.

This is the shadow risk that never makes it into threat models. An operator troubleshooting a fault at a remote substation with an intermittent LTE connection doesn’t write a security incident report when they work around a failed VPN session — they just get the job done. The security team never finds out. The audit log shows nothing. And somewhere in that gap between security policy and operational reality lives the exact vulnerability that nation-state actors and ransomware operators have learned to exploit.

The SANS Institute’s 2025 OT security survey underscores this directly: remote access paths remain a primary driver of OT security incidents, and many organizations still rely on VPN and jump server tools designed for stable IT networks. That’s not a technology lag — it’s a design mismatch. VPNs were built for environments where connectivity is reliable and operational continuity isn’t a safety variable. Industrial control system environments are neither of those things.

What makes Xona’s approach interesting is that it doesn’t solve this by relaxing security controls during network degradation — which would be the obvious but dangerous shortcut. Instead, it maintains session state and security enforcement simultaneously, preserving both operational continuity and auditability through the disruption. The audit trail doesn’t develop gaps. The session doesn’t drop into an uncontrolled state. The operator doesn’t face a binary choice between completing critical work and following security policy.

The Competitive Landscape Is Shifting

The OT secure remote access market has historically been fragmented between two inadequate categories: legacy IT tools (VPNs, jump servers, RDP gateways) that vendors have tried to retrofit for industrial use, and purpose-built OT solutions that often sacrificed usability and governance depth for operational compatibility. Xona has been making a sustained argument that neither category actually solves the problem, and Platform v5.5 is the clearest articulation of that argument yet.

The governance expansion in this release deserves particular attention from a competitive standpoint. Centralizing session recordings, policy enforcement, bandwidth metrics, and integration syncs across globally distributed operations addresses something that single-site or regional OT security deployments have long struggled with — the ability to enforce consistent access governance at scale without proportionally scaling the administrative burden. This is precisely the capability that large energy companies, utilities, and maritime operators need as they face increasing regulatory scrutiny across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

The deepening integrations with Forescout and Nozomi Networks also signal a maturation in how Xona positions itself within the broader OT security ecosystem. Rather than competing with asset visibility and anomaly detection platforms, Xona reinforces them — using their asset data to inform access decisions, and feeding session data back into their monitoring pipelines. This kind of ecosystem coherence is increasingly what enterprise buyers require, and it raises the barrier to entry for competitors who lack comparable integration depth.

Why This Matters Beyond the Product Announcement

Zoom out from the product capabilities for a moment and consider what this release reflects about where the OT security market stands in 2026.

Critical infrastructure operators face a genuinely difficult convergence: nation-state threat actors who have become sophisticated enough to exploit remote access vectors at scale, regulatory frameworks that increasingly demand real-time demonstrable governance rather than point-in-time compliance snapshots, and operational environments that have grown more complex and more distributed as remote work, third-party vendor access, and digital transformation initiatives have expanded the attack surface. Legacy architectures weren’t designed for any one of these pressures individually, let alone all three simultaneously.

What Xona’s v5.5 release represents — and what the broader market is slowly recognizing — is that OT secure access needs to be treated as operational infrastructure, not as a security overlay. The distinction matters enormously. Security overlays get bypassed when they create friction. Operational infrastructure gets maintained, upgraded, and depended upon because the cost of its failure is visible and immediate. By building session resilience directly into the access layer rather than treating it as a bonus feature, Xona is making an architectural argument: governance and operational continuity aren’t in tension; they’re the same requirement.

For OT security and operations leaders evaluating their remote access posture, this release surfaces a critical issue: does our access architecture work the same way under degraded network conditions as it does under ideal ones? If the honest answer is no — if a connectivity disruption anywhere in the chain causes security controls to erode, sessions to drop, or operators to find workarounds — then the architecture has a structural problem that feature-level improvements to existing tools won’t fix.

That’s a harder conversation than most organizations are having. But given where the threat landscape is heading, it’s the one that matters.