Partner POV | AI at the Edge: the Forescout 4D Platform™ Meets NVIDIA BlueField

This article was written and contributed by, Massimiliano Mandolini, Forescout, and Alex Bond, WWT. 

Forescout delivers AI powered by NVIDIA, where the cloud is not an option — faster, safer, and built for the demands of critical industrial operations.

The mission of cybersecurity has always been simple in theory: turn raw data into early warning signals before threats disrupt operations. In practice, this requires relentless effort, inspecting countless packets for malicious commands or payloads, running machine learning models to understand device behavior, and sifting through nonstop logs from engineering workstations and SCADA servers to find correlations.

The mission is now being overwhelmed by a flood of data. This deluge is driven by an ever-expanding network of connected assets: thousands of embedded sensors logging temperature and pressure, millions of real-time process variables from SCADA systems, and complex telemetry from autonomous robots and vehicles. The combination of network traffic analysis, authentication logs, and control system events creates a torrent of information that is simply too vast for traditional security methods to handle.

It's Time for a Reality Check: Security Teams Can't Keep Up

The reality is that most security teams are already running on empty. The Takepoint Research Global Industrial Cybersecurity Benchmark 2025 shows that organizations lack the staff to keep up with critical OT security tasks. With too few specialized personnel, essential processes like vulnerability prioritization, risk mitigation, and incident response suffer from delays and remain heavily manual.

Even when teams manage to keep pace, they often waste precious hours chasing the wrong things. Without contextual risk scoring or clear workflows, low-impact issues consume time while critical threats remain unresolved. According to the same research, this lack of focus is one of the biggest obstacles to timely response and effective remediation.

It's no surprise, then, that the same research highlights AI as the next major technology organizations plan to adopt in the coming 12–24 months to raise their security posture.

In this new landscape, the question is no longer whether an organization can process this data, but whether they can process it intelligently, at scale, and at the speed their operations demand.

Turning AI Into Real OT Security Outcomes

AI isn't about replacing human analysts. It's about giving them the scale, speed, and precision they need to keep up with the nonstop flood of industrial data. Traditional tools can only go so far; AI expands what's possible by turning overwhelming telemetry into clear, actionable intelligence. And when combined with Forescout's 4D Platform™, that intelligence doesn't stop at detection — it drives enforcement, segmentation, and resilience across critical operations. With the Forescout Platform as the foundation, we see AI evolving to support security teams with:

• Attack path and graph analysis – see how adversaries could move through industrial networks and pinpoint the choke points where policy and segmentation should be enforced.
• Threat and anomaly detection – learn what "normal" looks like for OT systems, then surface subtle deviations before they escalate into incidents.
• Risk scoring and prioritization – cut through the noise by highlighting the issues that threaten uptime and safety, not just the ones that trigger alerts.
• Guided response and remediation – accelerate investigations, recommend safe containment steps, and orchestrate enforcement.
• Natural-language investigation – ask questions like "show me all PLCs with recent firmware changes" and get answers without sifting through logs.
• Reporting assistants – automatically generate auditor-ready compliance or persona-based reports enriched with insights and context.
• Digital-twin simulation and early warning – run controlled "what-if" or penetration testing scenarios with active tools to understand potential impact and test defenses safely.

The promise of AI in industrial cybersecurity is clear: faster detection, sharper prioritization, and smarter response — but it must be delivered in a way that meets the demands of critical operations.

When AI Needs to Run Where Operations Happen

The Cloud has become the engine of speed and scale for modern enterprises, but critical environments play by different rules. Imagine a nuclear power plant handling sensitive data, an offshore rig with limited connectivity, a defense facility that's deliberately air-gapped, or any operation where links are fragile and information is too critical to leave the site.

The Forescout 4D Platform™, powered by NVIDIA BlueField data processing units (DPUs), delivers on-prem AI when connecting to a public cloud isn't an option. BlueField brings accelerated computing for cybersecurity with up to 400 Gb/s line-rate performance, merging high-speed networking and security processing directly in the data path. Deployed on every installed OT system and equipped with powerful computing, BlueField securely executes infrastructure capabilities independent of the host, in a separate trust domain, which is isolated from the host, ensuring trusted operation even when host resources are compromised. This enables BlueField to provide with attested real-time insights into workload behavior across the network, host, and application layers, enabling continuous monitoring of health, performance, and security for both applications and their components. This enables security teams to finally keep pace with the flood of data — accelerating event analysis, sharpening prioritization, and enabling real-time response without being buried in noise or alert fatigue.

Here's where you can use Forescout and NVIDIA together — and where the integration delivers unique value by solving challenges that cloud-only approaches can't touch:

• Servers and engineering workstations — monitor traffic directly from SCADA systems, without affecting CPU performance. Even when SPAN isn't available, delivering the visibility needed to secure operations without touching the network.
• Networking appliances already in place — firewalls, switches, packet brokers — extend the Forescout 4D Platform with on-premises AI, gaining advanced detection and control without new hardware rollouts or operational downtime.
• Custom gateways — purpose-built for performance, ruggedization, or integrated security, unlocking the full power of BlueField and NVIDIA Morpheus, a GPU-accelerated, end-to-end AI framework for building, customizing, and scaling cybersecurity applications, to consolidate security services, streamline workloads, and run multiple applications in parallel.
• Flyaway Kit — the Forescout 4D Platform in a box: a portable, self-contained deployment you can move and carry into remote, air-gapped, or mission-critical sites, bringing full-spectrum visibility and control with AI directly to the edge of operations.

Backed by NVIDIA accelerated computing, the Forescout 4D Platform™ gains the scale and speed to process massive streams of telemetry in real time. NVIDIA BlueField delivers Zero-Trust protection and real-time threat detection, turning raw network traffic into actionable insight closer to where threats emerge — rather than waiting for them to surface in the cloud.

The convergence of the Forescout 4D Platform™ and NVIDIA accelerated computing marks a new chapter for OT security — one where intelligence runs on site, resilience is built in, and protecting what can't fail becomes the standard for every critical operation.

AI adoption in critical environments will always raise questions of regulation, responsibility, and trust. That's why Forescout and NVIDIA are focused on delivering AI on-premises — giving organizations both the innovation they need and the control they demand.