IT and OT Training for Industrial Ethernet
Industrial IP Advantage has launched an eLearning course focused on IT/OT integration for Industrial Ethernet. This is the fourth in a series of training courses designed to meet the emerging needs of control engineers and IT professionals tasked with deploying a secure network architecture. These courses are jointly developed by Cisco, Panduit and Rockwell Automation and available on the Industrial IP Advantage website.
Controls engineers have the plant-level domain knowledge needed to identify and analyze new industrial technologies that will help improve production efficiency and flexibility. Meanwhile, IT engineers have the domain knowledge needed to present actionable information where it is needed within an enterprise and throughout the value chain. This new course provides both with a sufficient level of knowledge to collaboratively architect a smart, integrated control system.
“Convergence between the IT and OT worlds is demanding new skills and knowledge,” said Ricardo Borlone, product manager at Precision Inc. “These self-paced courses are filling the skills gaps, and allow each participant to advance in their own time, rhythm and learning capacity. I especially enjoy this training format as it provides me the opportunity to focus on areas that match my interest and needs.”
The online training brings together the combined knowledge, best practices and application-specific expertise of three industry leaders to help engineers build a holistic IP-based network architecture. The courses are designed to help engineers drive design decisions from the device-level to the enterprise-wide network, leveraging interactive, scenario-based training on topics, such as logical topologies, protocols, switching and routing, security, physical cabling and wireless considerations.
The four available courses include:
- Courses 1 and 2: Designing for the Cell/Area Zone
- Course 3: Designing for Industrial Zone
- Course 4: IT/OT Integration
The full training program is offered for $350 on the Industrial IP Advantage website.
“A critical mass of industrialized networking technology is now available. And for many manufacturers, the real challenge is finding qualified staff to design, deploy and maintain these networks,” said Paul Brooks, networks business development manager, Rockwell Automation. “The eLearning courses offered by Industrial IP Advantage are designed to help fill this skills gap.”
“Building a skilled and competent workforce ready to deploy a converged architecture presents businesses with more than just greater connectivity. It offers tremendous productivity gains, process efficiencies, and business value,” said Paul Taylor, senior manager, Cisco.
“A structured, engineered approach to assessing, designing, deploying and monitoring the physical infrastructure is necessary to ensure that investments in critical manufacturing networks deliver optimum performance,” said Ryan Lepp, director of business development, Panduit. “These new training courses help both IT and OT professionals work together to deliver optimal network performance with adherence to industry standards.”
Industrial IP Advantage is a community established by Cisco, Panduit and Rockwell Automation – three like-minded organizations joining together to educate the market on the benefits of Ethernet, Internet Protocol and EtherNet/IP. Industrial IP Advantage was formed in cooperation with ODVA, the organization that manages and commercializes the EtherNet/IP specification and standard.
The vision of Industrial IP Advantage is enabling smart manufacturing with a workforce that is fully prepared to accelerate the transformation to secure information architectures with best practices, education and training that drive IT/OT convergence.
What was once called Information Technology (IT) and then Manufacturing IT (for the IT jobs directly working with the plant such as MES applications) now seems to be falling under the Internet of Things label. Probably part of the reason that there is confusion as to what the IoT term really means.
