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November 17
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ndustrIal
C
omputIng
& C
ommunICatIon
within a minute. Furthermore, a ready-to-use
protocol gateway that supports the multiple
industrial protocols commonly used in OT
(such as PROFINET, PROFIBUS, EtherNet/IP,
and Modbus) simplifies protocol conversions,
resulting in significant cost- and time-savings.
Close cooperation between IT and OT profes-
sionals is fundamental to leverage any smart
application IIoT platform. Although OT
and IT approaches to problem-solving dif-
fer vastly, they both work towards the same
goal: optimized production. To be successful,
both domains need access to industrial data.
IT departments, which oversee Enterprise
resource planning (ERP) and sometimes MES,
need to review this data to form the bigger
picture and then develop solutions for each
of the issues that hamper an operation reliabil-
ity. OT professionals are more closely involved
with the physical operations on the factory
floor and have to figure out how to make all
the divergent systems, fitted mostly with pro-
prietary technologies, work together. On the
other hand, a positive trend in the era of Indus-
triy4.0 is that OT staff increasingly recognize
the importance and convenience of IT technol-
ogy in helping them achieve their goals.
IT departments face an increasing demand
to collect production data from shop floors
in order to optimize production. For IT staff,
this is not an easy task as they are not famil-
iar with the process of collecting data via
industrial protocols. Concurrently, OT staff
members face a similar predicament in that
once they have transferred OT data to the IT
layer, IT departments often request interfaces
Figure 2. There is more information exchange needed between OT and IT.
Figure 3. Engineers are nowadays not familiar with cloud technology.
