Concurrent with these business challenges are
technological issues impacting nearly every stage of the
manufacturing process, from the exponential growth of
data-driven sensors and mobile devices in plant operations,
to the convergence of traditionally separate Operations
and IT systems, to increasingly stringent compliance
requirements for data security, intellectual property, and
asset tracking.
Despite these imperatives, 54% of U.S. manufacturers
say they lack a unified view of what’s happening on the
plant floor (Aberdeen Group). Largely as a result of legacy
control systems that are more expensive to maintain
and operate with each passing quarter, IDC notes that
manufacturers are increasingly investing in "standardizing
production processes across their network of factories to
create better visibility, coordination, and orchestration."
Legacy Networks Compromise
Business Perforance
An IndustryWeek study found that manufacturers
average 3.6 application downtime incidents in a year,
with each incident costing anywhere from $10,764 to
$32,500, depending on the size of the company. CA
Technologies reported that the average manufacturing
revenue loss due to general IT downtime is $196,000
per company each year. In addition to continuity
challenges, these legacy factory networks also create
security vulnerabilities, with proprietary hardware and
software incorporating minimal consideration of extended
connectivity and security features in their original designs.
According to McAfee, “Industrial networks top the list of
systems most vulnerable to cyber-security issues,” and as
embedded sensors and mobile applications are increasingly
integrated with these systems, they provide an easy target
for gaining access to manufacturing operations, plant
assets, and business applications.
Technology Migrations Impede Execution
Factory floor managers migrating these legacy networks
from proprietary hardware-driven architectures to
standards-based designs are challenged to manage
these transitions without either disrupting production or
sacrificing agility to support dynamic customer needs.
Incremental deployments of standards-based technologies,
from high speed wireless architectures that enable real-time
mobileaccess to production designs and speed remote
management and maintenance, to centralized wired and
wireless management applications that leverage policies to
support production flows, can help streamline these factory
floor transitions and provide new capabilities to support
emerging applications like mobility, cloud, and virtualization
across both plant and factory operations.
Security Systems Inadequate Against
Emerging Threats
With a focus on streamlining the entire production chain,
manufacturers are increasingly federating their operations
systems with suppliers, partners, and vendors to increase
transparency and provide real-time and historical views into
factory workflows and assets. While this introduces new
efficiencies through increased automation and expanded
information sharing, these extended ecosystems also
create security vulnerabilities that if breached can result in
compromised customer data and intellectual property, and
potentially severe impacts to business continuity. Traditional appliance-based security approaches focused
on features such as content filtering and anti-virus are
inadequate for protecting the network against multiple
threats, especially those that may originate from inside the
network. Manufacturers increasingly require both granular
and broad-based approaches to ensuring data security and
effectively detecting, preventing, and mitigate evolving
security threats to intellectual capital, customer information,
production, and assets, from outside and within their
extended production networks.
