Are Nordic critical infrastructure operators truly ready for NIS2?

Across the Nordic region, there is a quiet confidence when it comes to cybersecurity. It’s well earned: years of investment in digital infrastructure, strong regulatory alignment, and a culture of trust have positioned Nordic organizations among the most advanced globally.

And yet, with the NIS2 Directive now coming into force, many teams are taking a moment to reassess, not out of concern, but out of pragmatism. Because readiness today is no longer defined by what’s in place, but by what can be seen, understood, and acted on in real time.

NIS2 as a moment of clarity

NIS2 is often described as a regulatory step forward. In practice, it acts more like a lens, bringing operational reality into sharper focus.

It asks organizations to move beyond:

• Defined policies to demonstrated outcomes
• Periodic assessments to continuous awareness
• Isolated controls to connected resilience

For many Nordic operators, this isn’t a departure, but a natural next step.

What becomes visible under NIS2

As organizations align with NIS2, a few consistent themes are emerging, not as failures, but as areas that were previously harder to quantify.

The complexity beneath stable operations

Critical infrastructure environments are designed for reliability, and many have been running safely for years, even decades.

But stability can sometimes mask complexity:

• Legacy and modern systems operating side by side
• Industrial protocols that don’t behave like IT traffic

Implicit trust between systems that were never designed for today’s threat landscape

NIS2 doesn’t create these conditions, but its new monitoring requirements make them more visible. For example, a Nordic energy distributor with once air-gapped SCADA systems from the 1990s may discover they’re now connected to modern IoT sensors for grid optimization. Three undocumented communication flows between legacy and modern environments emerge — not failures, just visibility into what has been running invisibly for years so it can be secured.

The expanding edge of responsibility

In the Nordics especially, infrastructure is deeply interconnected. Energy grids, transport systems, and industrial ecosystems rely on a web of trusted partners. This interconnectedness is a strength, but also a shared responsibility.

Organizations are now being encouraged to:

• See beyond their immediate perimeter
• Understand how dependencies influence risk
• Build confidence not just internally, but across the ecosystem

For example, a regional rail operator realizes this when mapping their actual dependencies: their signalling is their own, but connectivity depends on an older telecom infrastructure that was never formally risk assessed. The dependency was always there but the need to understand it is new.

The subtle gap between knowing and seeing

Many teams already know their environments well. They have documentation, expertise, and established processes. But NIS2 introduces a subtle shift: from what is known to what is continuously visible. That difference matters in moments that count, when something changes unexpectedly, or when early signals are easy to miss without the right context.

The shift toward operational confidence

What’s becoming clear across the region is that preparedness isn’t about adding more controls. It’s about building operational confidence:

• Confidence that you can see what matters,
• Confidence that anomalies won’t go unnoticed,
• Confidence that when something happens, you can respond quickly and clearly.

This is where many organizations are refining their approach and are quietly evolving from strong foundations to something more adaptive.

Enabling visibility without disruption

One of the defining challenges in critical infrastructure is that security cannot come at the expense of operations. Systems must remain available, stable and safe. This has led to growing interest in approaches that work with operational environments, not against them, providing:

• Passive, continuous visibility across OT and IT networks,
• Deep awareness of assets and communication patterns,
• Early identification of anomalies in industrial processes,
• Context that helps teams understand not just that something is happening, but why it matters.

When done well, these capabilities don’t add noise, they reduce uncertainty. A water utility implementing continuous monitoring of their OT network catches equipment degradation through subtle pattern changes, anomalies that traditional alerting would have missed. Consider it to be prevention, not disruption.

From readiness to resilience

There is a noticeable shift happening across Nordic organizations. The conversation is moving from: “Are we compliant?” toward: “Are we confident in how our systems will behave under pressure?”

Resilience becomes something practical, observable, and measurable. It also becomes something teams can build over time.

A region built for this moment

If there is any region well positioned to turn NIS2 into an advantage, it is the Nordics. Not because the challenges are smaller, but because collaboration is already embedded, trust between sectors is strong and digital maturity provides a solid base.

This creates the conditions for something more meaningful than compliance:

Shared resilience across critical systems that societies depend on every day.

What to take forward

For many organizations, the next steps won’t be dramatic, they will be deliberate.

• Making the unseen more visible
• Connecting insights across IT and OT environments
• Strengthening awareness of dependencies
• Building confidence in detection and response capabilities

These are natural progressions that build on what already exists.

A final thought

NIS2 is often framed as a deadline. But for many Nordic organizations, it feels more like a checkpoint, a moment to validate what’s working and refine what comes next.

The foundations are already strong. With the right visibility, context, and continuous awareness, organizations can move forward not just compliant, but confident in their ability to operate, adapt, and respond in an increasingly complex world. And that confidence is what resilience is built on.

Are you looking for a solution to support your organisation with the NIS2 Directive? Discover Netcontrol’s DOME cybersecurity service for any OT network, based on Nozomi Networks technology:

https://www.netcontrol.com/services/dome-cybersecurity-service/

Contact Netcontrol’s representatives for a personal meeting:

Finland

Oskari Mäkelä, Sales Director
Phone: +358 20 1520 648
Email: oskari.makela(at)netcontrol.com

Sweden

Örjan Eriksson, Managing Director
Phone: +46 21 17 77 95
Email: orjan.eriksson(at)netcontrol.com

Magnus Olofsson, Cybersecurity Manager
Phone: +46 70 87 65 839
Email: magnus.olofsson(at)netcontrol.com

Norway

Per Gjerløw, Managing Director
Phone: +47 22 724343
Email: per.gjerlow(at)netcontrol.com

Latvia

Kristaps Alcmanis
Phone: +371 26019793
Email: kristaps.alcmanis(at)netcontrol.com

www.netcontrol.com/contact/

Author

Andreas Nordenadler is the Regional Sales Director for the Nordics at Nozomi Networks. With extensive cybersecurity experience, Andreas is responsible for supporting industrial organizations and critical infrastructures in the region to secure and monitor their OT & IoT networks. Andreas comes from a long experience working with IT and OT security, having held positions at Microsoft, Bluecoat, Radware, CyberArk, Extrahop and Cyberbit before joining Nozomi Networks.