As industrial systems evolve toward Industry 5.0, the narrative is no longer about replacing humans with machines. Instead, it’s about enabling humans and machines to work together – a collaboration between human expertise and intelligent automation that emphasizes security, sustainability, and resilience.
According to Forbes, Industry 5.0 provides a vision of an industry that aims beyond efficiency and productivity and reinforces the role and the contribution of industry to society.1 However, cybersecurity must shift to meet this concept. While automation and agentic AI offer speed and scale, they introduce vulnerabilities when access and control systems become too predictable.
Read on to learn why human-approved access is so important for protecting your operations in Industry 5.0 and how Safous can help you add human oversight in access workflows without slowing productivity, in what we call "human-in-command cybersecurity."
Industry 5.0 builds on the connected automation of Industry 4.0. Efficiency is the goal, but it puts greater emphasis on long-term impact for operations as well as people and the environment.
Three ideas guide this shift:
Within this paradigm, human decision-making is still essential even as AI plays a bigger role in industrial operations – especially for high-risk activities like remote access to critical systems and production oversight.
The Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 68% of all breaches included a non-malicious human element,2 such as an employee falling victim to social engineering. Attacks that exploited vulnerabilities as an initial access vector also grew by nearly 180% year-over-year.3
Industrial organizations that use remote access for vendor connections, maintenance sessions, and production system links often rely on automation to approve these sessions. This is efficient, but it's also predictable. Once a bad actor learns that every vendor access from Region X between 02:00 and 04:00 is auto-approved, for example, they can schedule a strike accordingly.
The Dragos 8th Annual OT Cybersecurity Year in Review reported 1,693 ransomware attacks targeting industrial organizations in 2024, which was an 87% increase over the previous year.4 In Q4 2024 alone, manufacturing accounted for around 70% of all ransomware activity among industrial sectors.5
When remote access is granted automatically and happens the same way every time, it becomes easier to exploit. That’s why adding a manual approval step handled by someone with context helps break the pattern.
Human-in-command cybersecurity places human oversight, not in place of automation, but as a strategic decision point within the access workflow. This helps by:
At Safous, we’ve built human approval directly into our Safous Privileged Remote Access model. When a vendor or technician requests access, the system first checks identity, device posture, and session context. A human supervisor then reviews the request before granting access. Once approved, the session is isolated, monitored, and recorded automatically. Post-session logs and analytics provide a complete audit trail.
With this approach, industrial organizations get the speed and scale of automation with the judgment and oversight only a human can provide.
Here’s how the Safous platform brings human-in-command cybersecurity to life for industrial customers embracing Industry 5.0:
Instead of using always-on credentials or shared accounts, each access request is reviewed in real time. Supervisors validate the identity, timing, and purpose before approval.
Even after human approval, the session happens within a Zero Trust perimeter that uses network segmentation and least privilege, and is recorded for audit purposes. Automation can help with detection, but a human approves the access and reviews the audit.
Machine learning and analytics monitor patterns and escalate to humans when unusual activity is detected. The AI learns over time, but humans remain in final control of policy exceptions.
Aligning with Industry 5.0’s human-centric pillar, we center operational users: maintenance engineers, OT technicians, and plant managers. Our goal is to make their access safe, seamless, comprehensible, and auditable.
When attackers can’t predict when or how access is granted, it’s harder for them to plan an intrusion. Integrating a human review component increases flexibility without sacrificing security.
Ready to adopt Industry 5.0 securely? Start by applying these six best practices:
Review how your users and vendors access critical systems. Focus on high-risk areas like production environments and remote vendor maintenance, and flag sessions that are frequent, high privilege, and unsupervised.
For high-risk sessions like vendor admin, OT modifications, and remote plant devices, insert a manual review step for the access requests that impact production or sensitive assets.
Make sure to capture the full session, including what was done, by whom, and from where. Store for audit and post-incident reviews.
Use analytics to spot anomalies, but give humans the decision power for exceptions and escalations.
Avoid workflows that are too predictable. Vary approval methods and apply different levels of scrutiny where needed.
Focus on aligning with Forbes' human-centric, resilient, and sustainable Industry 5.0 framework. By empowering humans not replacing them and embedding oversight, you give your organization a secure footing for the future.
Human-approved access is a strategic safeguard for the evolving demands of Industry 5.0. As machines become smarter, more connected, and autonomous, having real people make informed access decisions gives your organization the control and context automation can’t provide on its own.
At Safous, we help organizations realize the human-machine alliance by embedding human-approved access control into industrial remote workflows. Because in the era where predictability is the new vulnerability, the strongest defense often begins with a person making a decision.
Ready to see how Safous can help you unify human and machine access governance under Zero Trust? Book a demo today.
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