ByDavid Tay, the CIO of Beyonics
You’d be hard pushed to find any organization today not involved in digital transformation projects. But the manufacturing sector was arguably one of the first to the game. Back in 2011, the German government first coined the term Industry 4.0 to describe the opportunities stemming from use of emerging technologies like cloud, IoT, big data, AI and robotics.
Yet security has always been a major challenge to such projects. In a smart factory environment, the operational technology (OT) — such as the IoT devices, connected systems, and human-machine interfaces (HMIs) used for manufacturing and production — is tightly integrated with traditional IT systems like cloud platforms. This is a problem because although IT security has achieved a certain degree of maturity, the same can’t be said of OT. Thanks to their connectivity, these systems become vulnerable to cross-pollinated cyber threats.
As we’ve found at Beyonics, the answer is to build...(continued)
