A Living Lab is a real-world test environment where technologies are developed, deployed, and evaluated with actual users and operational constraints. In cyber security, this matters because it lets defenders observe how systems behave outside the clean conditions of a lab, where legacy devices, third-party software, and human workflows all interact. For critical services such as water utilities, that realism helps reveal weak points in access control, logging, data quality, and network segmentation before a wider rollout.
Living Labs also appear in defense planning and attack analysis. Security teams use them to test monitoring tools, incident response playbooks, and anomaly detection on live-like data streams. Attackers may exploit the same complexity: real environments often have mixed trust levels, inconsistent configurations, and many dependencies, which can make manipulation of sensor data, credentials, or thresholds harder to spot. A Living Lab therefore improves validation, but it also raises the bar for governance, because the system must be both usable and protected while it is still evolving.