Big acquisitions typically receive the headline treatment: who bought whom, for how much, and whether the analysts approve. ServiceNow's acquisition of Armis deserves more attention than that.
The cost isn't as important as what this deal signifies. OT security has long been confined to a specialized part of the enterprise, run by those who speak a different language and use different tools than everyone else. But this is beginning to change. OT security is moving into the core of how companies view operational risk, and this acquisition underscores that shift.
For industrial organizations in the ServiceNow ecosystem, this is worth watching.
The Gap That's Been There All Along
ServiceNow built its reputation on solving problems that plague large organizations: disconnected workflows, inconsistent governance, and the eternal struggle to turn insight into action. The platform became the connective tissue for IT operations, security response, and business processes.
But when it came to OT and industrial environments, ServiceNow could orchestrate responses beautifully, once you told it what to respond to. The challenge was knowing what you had in the first place. Visibility was somewhat of a missing ingredient.
Security teams could track IT vulnerabilities and manage remediation workflows in ServiceNow. Operations teams could run production lines and manage plant operations. What they struggled to do was maintain a shared, accurate picture of what actually existed across industrial environments. The CMDB might have the official view, but anyone who's walked a plant floor knows the official view and reality don't always match.
You can't secure what you can't see, and you can't govern what you don't know exists. This gap meant ServiceNow could orchestrate OT security workflows in theory, but in practice, the foundational intelligence often wasn't there to make it work.
What Armis Brings to the Table
Armis has built its business on answering a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it yourself: "What's actually out there?"
The company provides deep, agentless discovery across IT, OT, IoT, medical devices, and all those unmanaged endpoints that accumulate in any environment over time. No agents to deploy, no additional load on production systems, no need to touch critical equipment that runs 24/7 and can't afford downtime for security tooling.
This matters in OT environments because risk doesn't start with known vulnerabilities that can be patched on a schedule. It starts with the unknowns. The PLC that's been sitting on the network for eight years, that nobody remembers commissioning. The building management system, which somehow became business-critical without anyone updating the documentation. The contractor’s laptop that connects every Tuesday and disappears before anyone thinks to document it.
Armis excels at finding these things, understanding what they are, how they communicate, and what risks they present. That intelligence has been valuable on its own, but integrating it into ServiceNow multiplies its impact.
Now that visibility can feed directly into the governance, risk management, and operational workflows that enterprises already run on ServiceNow. OT security stops being a parallel activity with its own tools and reports, and starts becoming part of how the enterprise manages risk as a whole.
Where This Gets Interesting
Technical integration matters. Almost as much as organizational shift.
When asset intelligence, exposure data, operational context, and governance workflows exist on the same platform, conversations change. Security teams and operations teams stop working from different sources of truth. The CISO's view of OT risk and the plant manager's view of production assets can finally reference the same data.
This creates space for better decisions. When someone identifies a critical vulnerability in an industrial control system, the response doesn't require three meetings and two different ticketing systems to coordinate. The context about what that system does, who owns it, what business processes depend on it, and what maintenance windows exist can all live in the same place as the vulnerability data and the remediation workflow.
For organizations trying to implement Zero Trust principles where appropriate in OT environments, this integration becomes particularly valuable. Zero Trust requires knowing what you have, understanding what's normal, and being able to respond when something deviates. That's dramatically easier when your asset intelligence and your security operations platform are talking to each other.
What This Means for Industrial Organizations
If you're running industrial operations and already have ServiceNow handling your IT operations and security orchestration, this acquisition opens new possibilities.
You can start treating OT security as an extension of your existing risk management approach rather than a separate domain that requires different tools and different processes. The specialists who understand PLCs and SCADA systems will still be essential, but no longer isolated, and their knowledge can now flow into enterprise-wide processes rather than staying siloed.
For organizations not yet on ServiceNow, this deal signals that major enterprise platforms are taking OT security seriously. This won't be the last move in this direction. The lines between IT and OT continue to blur, and the tooling is starting to reflect that reality.
The Bigger Picture
Acquisitions like this don't happen in isolation. ServiceNow is making a bet that enterprise platforms need to provide unified visibility and governance across all technology assets, not just the ones that live in data centers and cloud environments.
That bet reflects what industrial organizations have been experiencing for years: OT and IT can't be managed as separate domains anymore. The convergence is real, the risks are real, and organizations need platforms that can handle both.
Whether ServiceNow and Armis execute this integration well remains to be seen. Acquisitions are easier to announce than to integrate, and combining an enterprise platform with specialized security tooling has plenty of ways to go wrong.
But the direction is right. OT security belongs in the enterprise conversation about risk, resilience, and business continuity. It can't stay in the specialist corner forever, and this acquisition suggests it won't have to.
