A recent survey conducted by the ARC Advisory Group states that manufacturing companies are going through a “digital transformation midlife crisis“. The poll results have not yet been published, but a new article in Microsoft's Technology Record it gives us an overview. And it just confirms this feeling.
In response to the pandemic, supply chain issues, war and economic fluctuations, many industrial companies are embracing digital transformation. However, despite the undeniable advantages, they face scalability, security issues, put different systems together e create a unified data model. It follows that we are witnessing a growing interest in the middleware technologies enabling IT-OT integration, such as Skkynet DataHub, which directly address these issues.
Scale-up
“The main finding is that the majority of industrial manufacturing companies are on track for digitization, but continue to struggle with the complexity of managing from pilot project to scale-up,” says Rodriguez Lepage, Director of Product Marketing for Manufacturing by Microsoft. This is not surprising, since many of the solutions tested are new to the industrial world. Many solution providers are inexperienced in real-time data management from dozens of sources using multiple protocols while also generating thousands of measurement point changes every second.
This has been the goal for the development of Skkynet DataHub since day one and today we constantly verify the satisfaction of customers who use it.
Security
“One of the main issues that most concern industrial companies in digital transformation projects is security,” states the article. We are all involved in this cybersecurity war to make sure that technology can be used to the fullest and with the least possible risks. The White House first and the European Union with his NIS Directive2 defined the requirements for secure networked management of industrial data by requiring segmentation of OT and IT networks using DMZ.
La tunnel/mirror technology of Skkynet's DataHub, continuously refined over the past 20 years, provides a ready-to-use solution for network segmentation with DMZ that is unmatched in the market.
The pieces of the puzzle
The article highlights how manufacturing companies have to contend with a large number of industrial applications and protocols. “Some will have dozens or even hundreds of different vendors, equipment, proprietary protocols and applications that they're trying to cobble together,” Lepage says. “They are all looking for a path to digitization, with IT connectors to business systems and OT connectors to manufacturing execution systems (MES).”
This type of connectivity has been one of the pillars for Skkynet since its conception. The Skkynet DataHub was created to connect a field device supplier's industrial operating system (PLC, RTU, DCS or other) with another supplier's HMI or SCADA systems, in real time. Protocol conversion, TCP networking, and real-time data handling have been integrated into that application since its initial design and continue to feature heavily in today's products and services.
Unified data model
“Connecting OT and IT and creating a unified and extensible factory data model has proven to be a top priority for manufacturing companies to accelerate their digitization efforts,” says Lepage. “Ease of use in terms of interoperability with standard tools is also very important.”
As they move towards digital transformation, enterprises are starting to evaluate how Skkynet's DataHub architecture can provide them with the unified data model they need. Each application connects using its own protocol for send or receive data. Whenever a data value changes, the unified dataset is updated and the new value goes to each connected application using its protocol.
Then?
Midlife crisis? What crisis? Skkynet has been dealing with these issues for over 25 years, before most people even heard of digital transformation.
Meanwhile Skkynet has developed a deep understanding of the principles of industrial data communication and incorporating them into all the products and services it offers. ServiTecno has been distributing and supporting DataHub and all the products of the Skkynet line in Italy for years.
For info and tests see: www.servitecno.it
Taken from the article: https://skkynet.com/handling-mid-life-crisis-digital-transformation/