Connectivity: backbone of the digital enterprise — Part 1

Bridging the divide between operational technology (OT) and enterprise information technology (IT) in the right way will support collaboration and enhance overall production efficiency, reliability, visibility, flexibility and security.

For decades, the world’s many industries have invested heavily in information technology (IT) to reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and visibility and, ultimately, to boost profits. In doing so, IT professionals have laid a big part of the foundation for what’s called the ‘digital enterprise’. But for extractive, manufacturing and logistics industries, the digital enterprise also involves another form of technology on the ‘shop floor’ side of an organisation, which is commonly referred to as operational technology (OT).

Over the same decades that gave rise to IT, companies have invested hundreds of billions in OT, much of it for increasingly smart machines and systems to automate discrete production tasks and continuous processes. This includes automation control and higher-level OT management platforms to efficiently operate, monitor and optimise OT performance and maximise the utilisation of capital assets as much as possible. It also includes various industrial communication technologies that keep all these systems talking to each other and to their human operators.

The benefits have been many, including major reductions in costs, latencies and cycle times, as well as fewer data collection errors. Industrial communications — the so-called digital thread — has also helped interconnect what were once islands of activities and information, while also breaking down operational silos. Another benefit is full process transparency where, for example, it is possible to have instant access to quality data or stock levels, be more flexible and reduce reaction time to changing demand. In addition, companies can achieve vertical integration. This includes benefits such as instant access to service teams via the internet, immediate response to product changes through automated download of new production data from R&D, implementation of the digital twin in engineering and PLM processes, and real-time, global data availability.

Connecting these two worlds — IT and OT — for a truly end-to-end digital enterprise is ideally the role of modern industrial communications that are fast, reliable and secure. Unfortunately, for far too many organisations, sharing data between these two worlds can be a struggle because their network infrastructures could be more up to date and better connected.

Another important reason that makes connecting IT and OT a challenge is this: the perspectives of enterprise IT and OT professionals are typically very different. Although their jobs are interrelated in many ways, each tends to have dissimilar educational and on-the-job backgrounds to the other.

For example, IT staff often come from computer science backgrounds, while OT staff have industrial engineering backgrounds. IT professionals tend to focus on cost optimisation and security, while OT professionals tend to concentrate on production throughput and machinery availability. Both share concerns for productivity and efficiency. These distinct pedigrees can result in sometimes suspicious and occasionally adversarial perspectives toward the work each other does.

It doesn’t have to be that way — and indeed it shouldn’t be, if organisations are to realise the full promise of an end-to-end digital enterprise. That’s because modern industrial communications can tie the IT and OT sides of the digital enterprise together, while also enabling major transformations in how raw materials are sourced and transported, products are made and finished goods get to market.

It is only through an active IT/OT collaboration based on the mutual understanding of each other’s respective roles and backgrounds that data flows can be optimised over a company’s networks, the backbone of the digital enterprise. And we know that not all data spanning the digital enterprise is equal: some deserve special treatment, given the specific role particular data may play in a critical process or workflow.

Ultimately, by understanding the full potential of modern industrial communications, IT and OT can work together to ensure more operational efficiency, visibility, flexibility and security in production. This can help companies fully realise the promise of the digital enterprise to gain greater competitiveness and profitability both in the short term today and the long term tomorrow.

Marking the IT/OT divide

Classic corporate IT is a big job, although no more so than OT. Day to day, IT teams must be extremely tactical in support of end-user productivity, identity management, cybersecurity, office networks, and departmental file servers and printers, to name just some of their many day-to-day chores. Hours can be long and demands high.

At the same time, especially in large enterprises, their jobs can also involve the deployment and management of large strategic assets and capabilities — enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, big data analytics and other core applications residing in either data centres or the cloud.

Mission-critical IT

Sophisticated IT often can be core to what many companies do and be the foundation of their customer value propositions, if not their competitive differentiators, as well.

Take FedEx, for example. Back in the 1990s, the company deployed technologies such as wireless handheld scanners for its courier and counter staff supported by giant back-end databases, pioneering self-service package tracking for customers via a web portal. For a time, this capability gave FedEx a big competitive edge, although it’s now a standard in the logistics industry. IT was so vital to FedEx that company founder and CEO Frederick W Smith once described his firm as “an IT company that just happens to ship boxes to pay for it all”. In fact, the public networks and FedEx’s own private networks were critical enablers of that package-tracking functionality.

Hands full with the OT

While IT teams keep their companies’ front- and back-office operations running, their OT counterparts have their hands full keeping production running. Disruptions and downtime of components, instrumentation or systems can potentially have not only bottom-line consequences but also cascading downstream impacts on customer delivery commitments and satisfaction.

Life safety can be at stake, too. The Texas City refinery explosion in 2005, for example, killed 15 people and injured more than 100. The cause was found to be the failure of several level indicators, which led to the overfilling of a vapour-liquid separator. As a hydrocarbon geyser erupted, its flow was ignited by the engine of a truck idling nearby.

Many OT professionals are always on call. That’s because many industrial facilities — power plants, oil platforms and public communications, to name just three — must operate around the clock, in real or near-real time and with 99.999% uptime or better. Reliability, durability and availability are of utmost importance. In contrast, most enterprise IT networks must simply work during business hours.

OT teams also need to ensure that a complex, often heterogeneous, technology landscape at the field level — including sensors, actuators, valves, instrumentation and other devices, even conveyors — are all functioning properly, often in harsh operating conditions. At the same time, all these elements feed and draw operational data into and from a dynamic, vertical infrastructure consisting of a wide range of controllers, operator systems and manufacturing execution systems.

In addition, OT solutions used in discrete manufacturing typically must be finely tuned across their operating network structures and constituent components (both hardware and software). Those always-on components must use fixed IP addressing, resulting in different bandwidth cost models compare to enterprise IT networks that typically use dynamically assigned IP addressing.

What’s more, cycle timings, usually in milliseconds, and data communications need tight synchronisation across all of those components. This is true regardless of the industry and much more so in critical infrastructures such as power, communications and transportation.

Network differences

OT networks differ from enterprise IT networks, too. Data packet routing between network nodes in the former must operate deterministically compared to the latter’s ‘best effort’ routing. Deterministic means the routing of data packets must be predetermined in advance of their transmission, so the packets and their information payloads get to where they need to go within the cycle times required by a machine or process.

Why? Cyclically executing process programs need constantly updated input data in order to issue the appropriate control commands to components. Those commands have to arrive when expected, within milliseconds. In other words, a network hiccup that might delay an outbound email by a couple of seconds might not be noticed by a user, but a similar delay in a controller command arriving at its destination could disrupt an entire production line.

Time to bring teams together

To be sure, more and more companies the world over are moving toward greater integration that will help make them truly end-to-end digital enterprises. They’re bridging the divide separating IT and OT, in part by purposefully bringing both teams together to facilitate greater understanding and cooperation.

They’re also facilitating a vibrant digital thread of data throughout their businesses by modernising their network communications with advanced technologies, while incorporating OT’s precision requirements for production networks and data functionality into strategic plans for their overall enterprises.

Aligning perspectives

By aligning the different perspectives of IT and OT functions, these companies are helping to eliminate legacy information islands and silos that can slow down the speed of production and business, limit operational visibility and delay time to market.

They are leaving data synchronisation and transcoding issues in the past, so they no longer experience time-consuming, error-ridden data handoffs and cycle-time latencies. Quality has risen; rework has dropped. Operational visibility has improved too. And they have gained greater operational flexibility and new business agility that enables them to respond faster to dynamic customer demands and wholly new opportunities.

In short, they’re gaining advantages over less innovative competitors, who might be overlooking or ignoring issues spawned by the IT/OT divide.

But for those latter companies taking a wait-and-see attitude toward end-to-end digitalisation and modernising their network communications, competitive disadvantage isn’t their only risk of not doing so. They face a wide world of cyber threats — external and internal — just waiting to exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in a fragmented digital landscape.

Obscure vulnerabilities

While industrial networks may appear inside companies as stand-alone, closed-loop systems, often they can be connected at some obscure point to the enterprise network. If so, the latter’s external-facing cyber vulnerabilities can then extend to the industrial network.

Another set of security issues with industrial networks involves their evolution from early assortments of electrical relays or antiquated microprocessor controllers and manually monitored indicator lights, trips and breakers. Those legacy systems might work well enough to operate relatively simple processes even today, but they likely lack proper security controls.

For example, these systems may well be connected to modern distributed control systems that feature the latest PLCs. The latter are essentially microcomputers using Windows or Linux and are connected over industrial Ethernet to HMIs. In turn, these HMIs are often accessible remotely via PCs or touch-screen tablets and smartphones — by legitimate operators or by hackers exploiting the vulnerabilities in the connections between old and new systems.

To make matters worse, the integration of the two kinds of networks can also introduce uncertainty within companies as to whether IT or OT owns responsibility for overall cybersecurity. As result, accountability issues can arise, manifesting themselves as cybersecurity gaps.

In contrast, for companies intent on building an end-to-end digital enterprise, the question of who owns cybersecurity will not be an issue. That’s because IT and OT will have clearly defined roles and responsibilities, understood by both sides.

In Part 2

Bringing the IT and OT teams together and aligning their perspectives is essential in making IT/OT integration work. In Part 2 of this article we will look at modern up-to-date network infrastructures that can better support IT/OT integration.

Top image: ©stock.adobe.com/Olivier Le Moal