AUGUST 20189Seen as two distinct domains of a business often operating in silos, the increased demand on industrial production, advent of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), integration of network sensors and associated software with complex physical ma-chinery has created some common ground between IT and OT.This has allowed manufacturers to see the benefits of IT ­ OT con-vergence, who are now striving to bridge the divide between these two essential business elements. Clients we work with are fast realizing that this will help them with risk reduc-tions, enhanced performance, effec-tive management of assets data and gains in flexibility. It has also been foreseen by Gart-ner that by 2020, 50 percent of OT service providers will create key partnerships with IT-centric provid-ers for IoT offerings.While this clearly highlights the significance of this convergence, let's have a look at some of the far-reaching benefits that manufac-turers can gain by bringing IT and OT together - Substantial Insights - Primari-ly OT systems captures data from various sources. This data is then processed and stored by IT sys-tems. Business intelligence tools or enterprise asset management (EAM) system can analyze this data to make better decisions related to lon-ger-term asset manage-ment processes. Further, with Big Data Analytics, data captured by OT sys-tems can be analyzed for data mining, pattern recog-nition and statistical anal-ysis. Similarly, data col-lected from OT systems like online monitoring equipment and sensors which typically includes pressure, temperature, historic equipment loading, dura-tion and frequency of short-circuits and through faults, number of oper-ations, and more can all be utilized by IT systems to derive meaningful insights on maintenance programs and asset replacement. Increased Situational Aware-ness - In this age of advanced man-ufacturing, a number of IT solutions and software are capable of extract-ing data from complex OT systems used to monitor events, processes and devices. This data can be used to augment the querying capabili-ties of the entire workforce. The in-formation can be directly displayed over dashboards that are now avail-able as cost-effective out-of-the-box solutions and can be customized to the specific job function. Different dashboards can be used to display different information for operations, floor manager, supervisors, senior management etc. Users can scan this live stream of information available in the form of charts, graphs and numbers in real time and gain deep-er insights about the current situa-tion to make the right decision in a timely manner. Enhanced Security - In modern day operations ma-chines on factory floors are increasingly being linked to the network which is result-ing in numerous benefits to the manufacturer. How-ever, considering this advancement, while keeping in mind the recurrent cyber at-tacks in general, manufacturers are now focusing on regular system secu-rity updates and main-tenance. But, patching, upgrading and replacing systems without consid-ering its implications on OT is potentially a down-time disaster which can adversely affect the profit margins of the com-pany. When IT and OT work-togeth-er on enhancing the cyber security of the factory, the manufacturer can avoid unintentional downtime. It paves the way for current secu-rity management capabilities to be extended to the OT environments, delivering more effective risk man-agement and incident response.The Future of IT/OTConventionally, IT and OT have met specific requirements serving dis-tinct enterprise functions. Techno-logical, cultural and organizational differences between these two en-vironments have been well estab-lished over the years bottlenecking the benefits that could be arise out of the convergence. However, today as their conjoined applicability arises from the IIoT, predominant IT ven-dors are gradually moving towards IoT, leveraging common program-ming platforms and operating sys-tems, user interfaces, hardware.The Indispensable elements of smart manufacturing, IIoT and IT ­ OT convergence presents a mul-titude of opportunities for manu-facturers going forward as more devices become a part the IIoT eco-system. Forward thinking manufac-turers looking to outpace the poten-tial disruption are already looking at integrating out-of-the-box solutions for plant automation, asset manage-ment and manufacturing execution systems that can leverage the com-bined strength of IT and OT environ-ments, consciously bridging the di-vide between the two. As this trend continues, businesses will achieve smarter analytics, shorter develop-ment cycles as well as high levels of security administration. Ultimately, this will lead us into a future where the dividing line between OT and IT would dwindle and we will only have technology or `T'. Bhupendra Bhate
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