Operational technology (OT) security professionals are increasingly moving towards a containerized architecture of the supervisory parts of industrial control systems (ICS), with sensors and other legacy equipment remaining in the field. This emerging architectural trend is gaining adoption in renewables, distributed energy and smaller-scale projects in onshore oil and gas. The architecture enables asset operators to scale common automation architecture and data governance across the enterprise, supports detection, response and recovery activities at scale, and can support more centralized maintenance and operation among geographically distributed assets. In contrast to traditional automation, assets can be patched in real time without it affecting operations and new vendor features can be pushed after being tested in a containerized test bed. Containerized ICS enables unified security services for monitoring, discovery and protection in a way that traditional on-premises proprietary control systems have not supported at scale. The adoption of containerized ICS can be a significant accelerator in moving real-time and asset data into a common industrial data operations layer. With this data in the cloud, it is much easier to support the identity management and access control needed for off-premise energy value chain data consumers, such as the operational and maintenance experts, trading, compliance, safety and data scientists that need granular and secured data access to perform their roles. While containerizing ICS has a number of security and operational benefits, adopting containerized ICS requires: investment in architecture to support data persistence; developing OT security teams with container experience; staffing up centralized oversight management and orchestration; site-to-cloud connectivity improvements; and implementing virtualized test beds to support this constant update cycle.