by Gary Mintchell | Aug 1, 2019 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT
Cybersecurity as a concept or even as a term didn’t exist when I discussed the future of connected control systems devices with my customer, a senior control systems engineer for an automotive component manufacturer in the 1990s. He was aware of potential problems of connectedness when he told me, “I will never run a wire from a control system in this plant.”
Today? Everything is connected. Cybersecurity is a known, if sometimes devalued, challenge. How much do organizations understand the risk exposure of IoT devices? Deloitte and Dragos, Inc. share top risks to organizations in current IoT environment.
Key takeaways:
- In the digital age, cyber is everywhere. Cyber risk now permeates nearly every aspect of how we live and work. Organizations should better understand how to manage the risks created by known and unknown Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices.
- Security-by-design saves time: it takes longer to retroactively fix issues than it does to do it correctly the first time when building the product.
- Security-by-design reduces cost: it costs more to mitigate the risk of vulnerability exploitation than to implement security in the beginning.
- According to a recent Deloitte poll, nearly half of respondents (48%) realized it is imperative, when developing or deploying secure-by-design connected products and/or devices, that both of these conditions exist:
- o DevSecOps embedded throughout the design/acquisition, implementation, and deployment lifecycle.
- o Cross-functional technology that includes teaming with legal, procurement and compliance across pre- and post-market deployments.
Why it matters?
The number of cyberattacks, data breaches and overall business disruption caused by unsecured IoT/IIoT devices are increasing because many companies don’t know the depth and breadth of the risk exposures they face when leveraging IoT devices and other emerging technologies. IoT and IIoT are a set of business and technology innovations that offer many compelling benefits, but they also present significant cybersecurity risks and a greatly expanded attack surface. Mitigating these risks by understanding IoT/IIoT platform security can help organizations realize greater potential and benefits of these innovations.
Why is security-by-design important?
Deloitte and Dragos are teaming on a number of client initiatives to help organizations embed a security-by-design approach and to manage the risk of industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT) environments by enabling them to better monitor and assess threats. Organizations can benefit from a better understanding of threats in this environment, which can then be used to develop and embed cybersecurity strategies into organizational and technology strategy.
Security-by-design (for designing an IoT/IIoT product) is about incorporating cybersecurity practices by default into the product’s design as well as (for onboarding an acquired IoT/IIoT product) incorporating cybersecurity practices by default into the environment in which the IoT product is implemented.
Beyond securing ICS and OT systems, this combination of cyber risk services and technologies can provide a more complete picture of an organization’s ICS and OT threat landscape through active monitoring that can better inform scenario planning and response.
The following top risks were outlined by leaders from Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory’s cyber practice and Dragos in a recent Deloitte Dbriefs webcast, The Internet of Things and cybersecurity: A secure-by-design approach:
Top 10 security risks the current IoT environment poses
- Not having a security and privacy program
- Lack of ownership/governance to drive security and privacy
- Security not being incorporated into the design of products and ecosystems
- Insufficient security awareness and training for engineers and architects
- Lack of IoT/IIoT and product security and privacy resources
- Insufficient monitoring of devices and systems to detect security events
- Lack of post-market/ implementation security and privacy risk management
- Lack of visibility of products or not having a full product inventory
- Identifying and treating risks of fielded and legacy products
- Inexperienced/immature incident response processes
Key quotes
“Security needs to become embedded into the DNA of operational programs to enable organizations to have great products and have peace of mind. Today all sorts of products are becoming a part of cyber: from ovens to instant cookers, 3D printers to cars. Organizations need to consider what can actually go wrong with what is really out there and look at those challenges as a priority.”
– Sean Peasley, a partner in Risk & Financial Advisory and the Consumer & Industrial Products leader and Internet of Things (IoT) Security leader in Cyber Risk Services at Deloitte & Touche LLP
“Organizations need to think through this. There are a lot of requirements and they need to figure out a strategy. When looking at product security requirements, I see this as a challenging aspect as organizations get a handle around what they are manufacturing. There are organizations for example in industries such as health care, medical devices, and power and utilities that are starting to ask questions of their suppliers as they consider security before they deploy devices into their customer ecosystem. Where I see a lot of organizations struggle is in understanding system misconfiguration or not having the architecture they thought they did in order to make sure their manufacturing environment is reliable.”
– Robert M. Lee, CEO at Dragos Inc.
About the online poll
More than 4,200 professionals across industries and positions participated in and responded to poll questions during the Deloitte Dbriefs webcast, “The Internet of Things and cybersecurity: A secure-by-design approach” held May 30, 2019. Answer rates differed by question.
A majority (81%) of respondents indicated that information security is accountable for the securing of connected products in their organization. The information security team is still primarily where boards look to drive their cyber agenda but as the 2019 Future of Cyber survey indicates, cyber is becoming everyone’s responsibility. It is critical to understand that if you are the plant manager you likely have the responsibility to the safety and liability of the operation. But the challenge is that everyone does have a role to play. Ultimately, the CEO is going to be held accountable.
Organizational confidence in security
How confident are respondents that their organizations’ connected products, devices, or other “things” are secure today? Not very. More than half
of respondents (51%) were somewhat confident, while 23% were uncertain or somewhat not confident, with only 18% feeling very confident in their organizations’ ability to secure connected products and devices. This may be as a result of there being an overall lack of standardization across industries for security and awareness of cyber risks and connected devices.
Guidance for security-by-design
A positive revelation in the results was when 41% of respondents indicated that they look to industry and professional organizations for guidance in driving security-by-design within their organizations. Another 28% said that they look first to regulatory bodies and agencies that set the standards; and 22% indicated their leading practices were developed internally for providing that guidance in driving security-by-design.
According to Peasley and Lee, it is a favorable strategy for organizations to understand leading practices and standards of peer organizations first, and then look to the regulatory bodies that are starting to shape standards and regulations and help inform the standards and regulations that are to come.
These results conflict with another question regarding whether their product teams use a defined set of product cybersecurity requirements as input for requirements selection. Twenty-eight percent use an industry defined framework, and 41% indicated a custom framework, while 30% of respondents indicated “No” that they didn’t use a defined set of requirements. The results of this question indicate there is still much work to do across the industry to influence and inform on standards for cybersecurity.
Considerations for organizations
• Understand the current state of product security and develop a cyber strategy: Whether designing connected products or acquiring such products to implement internally, assess how products, including the data they produce, are protected and develop a cyber strategy to drive improvement.
• Establish security-by-design practices: Integrate security-by-design into the design of the product itself or into the design of the ecosystem architecture, through requirements, risk assessments, threat modeling and security testing.
• Set the tone from the top: Ensure the right people are engaged and have ownership of the process – from leadership to the relevant product security subject matter experts to the product teams.
• Have a dedicated team and provide them with ample resources: Don’t expect enterprise security teams to cover missions without adding new resources for them; build a dedicated team that has product-based experience and provide training as needed to increase knowledge.
• Leverage industry-available resources: Rather than developing and providing unique questionnaires to your device vendors, use publicly-available industry resources.
Worth noting
• “Secure IoT by design: Cybersecurity capabilities to look for when choosing an IoT platform”
• According to the recent Deloitte “2019 Future of Cyber” survey, there are notable gaps in organizations’ abilities to meet cybersecurity demands for the future. Results from the survey indicate that many cyber organizations are challenged by their ability to help better prioritize cyber risk across the enterprise (16%). To see additional results the Future of Cyber survey, download a copy.
The Dragos ICS asset identification, threat detection, and response platform distills decades of real-world experience from an elite team of ICS cybersecurity experts across the U.S. intelligence community and private industrial companies. Dragos’ offerings also include threat hunting and incident response services, and Dragos WorldView for weekly threat intelligence reports. Dragos is headquartered in the Washington, DC area.
Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world’s most admired brands, including nearly 90% of the Fortune 500 and more than 5,000 private and middle market companies.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 31, 2019 | Asset Performance Management, Internet of Things, Productivity
Moving to sustainable sources of energy to generate electrical power, as Europe has, requires a balancing act. Solar and wind generation provide an imbalance of power since they only operate when proper atmospheric conditions exist—i.e. sunlight or wind. Hydro generation provides a necessary balance, explained Pier-Vittorio Rebba, technology manager power generation for ABB.
But many hydro plants are aging. Management realizes the need to digitalize operations to obtain the best use of Asset Performance Management applications as well as best optimization of plant assets. ABB and its customer Enel Green Power partnered to digitalize operations delivering predictive maintenance solutions that will lower maintenance costs and transform the performance, reliability, and energy efficiency of its hydropower plants throughout Italy.
The three-year contract will enable 33 of Enel Green Power’s hydroelectric plants, comprised of about 100 units, to move from hours-based maintenance to predictive and condition-based maintenance, leveraging the ABB Ability Asset Performance Management solution. With operations in five continents, the Enel Group’s renewable business line, Enel Green Power, is a global leader in the green energy sector, with a managed capacity of more than 43 GW.
“We are privileged to be partnering with Enel Green Power, a digital pioneer, in their move from hours-based to predictive maintenance utilizing ABB Ability technologies for big data, machine learning and advanced analytics,” said Kevin Kosisko, Managing Director, Energy Industries, ABB. “Predictive maintenance and asset performance management must become a key component of plant operators’ strategies to optimize maintenance operations, minimize risk, improve resilience and reduce costs. The results are more competitive electricity rates, in a more sustainable way.”
Collaborating closely since early 2018, the two companies have jointly developed and tested predictive maintenance and advanced solutions (PresAGHO) via a pilot on five Enel plants in Italy and Spain, including Presenzano, a 1,000-megawatt plant near Naples.
The new contract includes digital software solutions and services that will provide analysis of over 190,000 signals and the deployment of about 800 digital asset models, aimed at improving plant operational performance, reducing unplanned failures and enabling more efficient planned maintenance practices through predictive maintenance. The integration is expected to yield savings in fleet maintenance costs and increase plant productivity.
The ABB Ability Collaborative Operations Center for power generation and water will help bring wider benefits of digitalization and engagement, supporting informed decision-making, real-time solutions and cost savings. The center already provides similar digital solutions and advanced applications for more than 700 power plants, water facilities and electric vehicle charging stations globally.
“With personnel retirements resulting in knowledge gaps and more competitive electricity marketplaces, we believe that many power generation customers globally can benefit from this kind of digital transformation around maintenance and operations,” said Mr Kosisko.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 12, 2019 | Commentary, Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, News
It is great to see things mature–whether kids or adults or technologies. Or an open source project called EdgeX Foundry. Yesterday I had the pleasure of two exciting teleconferences regarding the latest release of EdgeX Foundry, named Edinburgh, from the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge organization. I’ve had many conversations with Jason Shepherd, LF Edge Board Member and Dell Technologies IoT and Edge Computing CTO, over the past three years. When we finally got a chance to catch up yesterday afternoon, he could not have concealed his excitement had he tried.
I have written about EdgeXFoundry here from Hannover 2017, again in 2018, and when incorporated in Linux Foundation’s LF Edge umbrella. This IoT platform is more than a platform. During my Hannover visits of 2017 and 2018 it seemed that all God’s children need to develop their own IoT platform. Of course, when a company develops a platform the goal is to connect as many apps as possible to its main application.
I have also been involved with organizations trying to accomplish this same thing through standards. Problem is, you just can’t get technology supplier companies to sign up for a platform that forces their products to be subservient to standards. The better approach is Loosely Coupled (book by Doug Kaye).
The first conversation was with Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation, and Keith Steele, chair of the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and CEO of IOTech. They walked me through the release and its meaning.
Important takeaway–This Open Source IoT Platform/Ecosystem is now stable and ready for PrimeTime.
Highlights:
- Enables IoT digital transformation for Enterprise, Industrial, Retail and Consumer
- Supports complementary products and services from global open ecosystem including commercial support, training and customer pilot programs
- Deployed in many end user projects; EdgeX also collaborates with IIC on AI testbeds and is the foundation for the Open Retail Initiative (ORI)
Created collaboratively by a global ecosystem, EdgeX Foundry’s new release is a key enabler of digital transformation for IoT use cases and is a platform for real-world applications both for developers and end users across many vertical markets. EdgeX community members have created a range of complementary products and services, including commercial support, training and customer pilot programs and plug-in enhancements for device connectivity, applications, data and system management and security.
Launched in April 2017, and now part of the LF Edge umbrella, EdgeX Foundry is an open source, loosely-coupled microservices framework that provides the choice to plug and play from a growing ecosystem of available third party offerings or to augment proprietary innovations. With a focus on the IoT Edge, EdgeX simplifies the process to design, develop and deploy solutions across industrial, enterprise, and consumer applications.
Thefourth release in the EdgeX roadmap, Edinburgh offers a stable API baseline for the standardization of IoT edge applications that future-proof IoT investments by fostering an ecosystem of interoperable microservice-based capabilities and decoupling investments in edge functionality in areas such as connectivity, security and management from any given backend application or cloud. The EdgeX framework is designed to facilitate the secure deployment and management of devices and applications at the edge to accelerate time-to-market and enable new data-based services and capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
“Since its launch, EdgeX Foundry has experienced significant momentum in developing an open platform that can serve as the industry framework for IoT and edge-related applications,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “EdgeX Foundry is one of the anchor projects for LF Edge and Edinburgh release is a major step in unifying open source frameworks across IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge.”
“Having started the EdgeX movement with a small team at Dell before contributing the code to the Linux Foundation, it’s certainly amazing to see the traction we’ve gotten through open, vendor neutral collaboration in a few short years,” said Jason Shepherd, former chair of the EdgeX Foundry Governing Board and IoT and Edge CTO, Dell Technologies. “It’s a testament to the power of the network effect in the open source community which ultimately enables developers to focus on value rather than reinvention.”
EdgeX Foundry’s community adoption continues to accelerate. Currently, there are more than 100 unique contributors to the project and code downloads are approaching 5,000 a month at a 75% month-to-month growth rate. Momentum is expected to continue with EdgeX’s Edinburgh releaseand rapidly growing commercial support in the ecosystem.
Key features for this release include:
- Stability: Stable API’s protecting future investment and supporting future long term support
- Connectivity:More SDKs for north and southbound connectivity and a wider range of standard connectors
- New Features: Significant new features, including binary data support, database swapability and improved APIs to help facilitate management/monitoring capability
- Global Support:Support from the global EdgeX Foundry ecosystem – as well as the broader LF Edge umbrella community – that offers a range of complementary products and services
“With this EdgeX Edinburgh release, we will radically change how businesses develop and deploy IoT edge solutions,” said Keith Steele, chair of the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and CEO of IOTech. “Edinburgh is a significant milestone that showcases the commercial viability of EdgeX Foundry and the impact that it will have on the global IoT edge landscape.”
Learn more aboutdocumentation, a new use caseand the technical details for theEdinburgh releaseon the EdgeX website.
Market Utilization of EdgeX Foundry
Since the project inception, there have been tens of thousands of trials and pilot deployments of the EdgeX framework in the field and many of these are converting to production with the Edinburgh release. Several organizations already provide commercial solutions based on EdgeX, with many others folding it into their product roadmaps. For example:
- Edge Xpert:From IOTech Systems, Edge Xpert uses the latest stable release of EdgeX Foundry to create a commercially supported solution from the baseline open source technology. IOTech will also soon announce hard real-time extensions to EdgeX.
- MFX-1 IoT Edge Gateway: From Mainflux, the MFX-1 IoT Edge Gateway based on the EdgeX Foundry framework, is an edge computing solution supported with the EdgeFlux application for gateway management. Integrated with Mainflux IoT Cloud Platform it provides comprehensive Cloud /Edge IoT System.
- NetFoundry Ziti Edge: NetFoundry’s Ziti Edge provides programmable, software-only “Northbound” connectivity for EdgeX Gateway applications and services. Based on Zero Trust security principles, with integrations for HW root of trust based identity and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), Ziti Edge delivers secure “Silicon-to-Cloud” connectivity, using any Internet connection, while keeping both sides of the connection “dark” to the Internet.
- VMware Supports EdgeX: Developers who deploy any combination of EdgeX Foundry and/or Project Photon OS with VMware Pulse IoT Center can receive support from VMware for both Pulse IoT Center and EdgeX open source software. When used with Pulse IoT Center’s device management capabilities, open source tools such as EdgeX offer developers increased control over how, when, and where they run their applications and manage their data.
The EdgeX framework is also being leveraged in various industry collaborations. For example, in collaboration with the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) EdgeX is used as the foundation for the Optimizing Manufacturing Processes by Artificial Intelligence (OMPAI) testbed which explores the application of AI and industrial internet technologies, deployed from the edge to the cloud, to optimize automotive manufacturing processes. EdgeX is also the foundation for the Open Retail Initiative (ORI) which has the goal of facilitating open innovation within the retail/commerce space. Work for the ORI is manifested within the Commerce Working Group in the EdgeX project and initial target use cases include computer vision-assisted advanced loss prevention.
Planning Ahead
Later this summer, the first EdgeX Foundry ecosystem hackathon will be hosted in the Bay Area. This initial event will be tied to the Commerce Working Group, hosted by Intel within the EdgeX project, with various award categories for implementation of the EdgeX framework in retail use cases. The best all-around winner will get to showcase their solution at future LF Edge or EdgeX Foundry events. Details will be available in late July via the EdgeX website, email list and Slack channel.
Additionally, LF Edge will host a workshop entitled “State of the (LF) Edge” on August 20 in San Diego, Calif., co-located with Open Source Summit North America(August 21-23). More details are available here.
Support from Contributing Members and Users of EdgeX Foundry
- “EdgeX Foundry is the key component of Beechwoods IoT gateway solution that allows our customers to engage confidently in edge computing technology. With the Edinburgh release, this solution will be ready to transition from customer engagement to product deployment.” – Brad Kemp, President, Beechwoods Software
- “The Edinburgh release of EdgeX Foundry brings much needed standardization and stability for edge computing in production environments through an open source, common framework. The availability of the EdgeX Foundry snap enables developers an easy path to getting started with EdgeX Foundry, and benefit from confinement, easy integration into their own infrastructure, and automatic updates. In addition, this release introduces new device snaps providing integration with MQTT and ModBus.”- Loic Minier, IoT Field Engineering Director, Canonical
- “As EdgeX Foundry reaches maturity with the Edinburgh release, CloudPlugs is excited to also announce the integration of the CloudPlugs IIoT platform with the open EdgeX ecosystem. CloudPlugs IoT is a robust backend to deploy, orchestrate and manage EdgeX-compliant devices and micro service-based applications, as well as to manage and visualize field data. The EdgeX framework provides new levels of flexibility in field-level interoperability and the combination of EdgeX with CloudPlugs IoT delivers a powerful, end-to-end software and service stack to digitize assets and to deploy commercial and industrial IoT solutions at scale.” – Jimmy Garcia-Meza, CEO, CloudPLugs Inc.
- “EdgeX Foundry provides an important software platform standardizing on the south bound IoT device connectivity and northbound data storage connectivity and allows vendors to plug-in their core IoT capabilities in between. FogHorn is aligned with this data ingestion and publication standardization and will continue to collaborate as appropriate.” – Sastry Malladi, CTO, FogHorn
- “The EdgeX platform offers HMS Networks a path to quickly build Industrial IoT solutions by providing predefined set of services for I/O functionality. HMS has created a J1939 service for EdgeX platform to help simplify IoT solutions for the commercial vehicle telemetry market. Ultimately, the EdgeX platform will significantly reduce the R&D investment required to create a majority of the Industrial IoT applications required in the market today.” – Tom McKinney, Director Engineering Services and Business Development, HMS Networks
- “EdgeX Foundry is an important project arriving at the right time. It promises to connect devices to capabilities, and then get out of the way so you can run containerized workloads to generate insights, run model scoring, or detect anomalies… all at the edge. IBM is collaborating with EdgeX Foundry as part of our hybrid cloud strategy to help enterprises unlock the value of data from on-premises to the cloud to the edge.” – David Boloker, Distinguished Engineer, IBM
- “EdgeX Foundry’s open source platform enables the industrial software ecosystem to integrate rapidly with ioTium’s managed services converged infrastructure offering – it’s microservices framework with open APIs is a powerful driver in the fragmented Industrial Control Systems market. ioTium enables rapid scalable deployment of the EdgeX Foundry framework globally.”- Ron Victor, CEO, ioTium
- “EdgeX Foundry provides an open framework for ease of design, development, & deployment at the Edge, while addressing stringent security, privacy & compliance requirements. NetFoundry added its vendor-agnostic, connectivity-as-code solution to EdgeX in order to enable developers and integrators to get similar ease of use, security and performance for their northbound application connectivity to core, clouds and service meshes. With the release of the EdgeX Edinburgh release, the EdgeX Foundry developer community has all the tools needed to deliver on market needs and ensure secure, agile innovation at the Edge” – Galeal Zino, CEO, NetFoundry Inc.
- “As Digital Transformation for IoT gathers momentum, companies are demanding the same reliability, performance and security at the edge as they are used to getting from their Cloud Computing stack. With this release, EdgeX with Redis Labs RedisEdge not only delivers upon those expectations, but provides an ecosystem of open source technologies and plug-ins such as Redis Modules that help developers innovate.” – Dave Nielsen, Head of Community and Ecosystem Programs, Redis Labs
- “EdgeX Foundry addresses the problem of the license stack at the IoT Edge constantly increasing in cost by providing a well architected, high performance, open source platform that can be used for industrial solutions today.” – Mike Malone, Vice President, Technotects, Inc.
- “EdgeX Foundry’s global community ecosystem has experienced explosive growth, and the tangible advances delivered in the EdgeX Edinburgh release are exciting developments for edge computing. We fully support EdgeX Foundry’s goals to establish an open interoperable framework for edge computing to provide developers with increased control over how, when, where and with whom they run their applications and manage their data. We look forward to continuing our contributions to the EdgeX Foundry community and related efforts in fostering open industry-wide innovation such as the Open Retail initiative.” – Mimi Spier, Vice President, Edge and IoT Business, VMware
- “As a founding member of LF Edge, Wipro is proud to have contributed to the Edinburgh release. We will continue to actively participate as it is a key platform for delivering open, microservices-based, edge IoT applications for today’s interoperable distributed enterprise world.” – Andrew Aitken, general manager and global open source practice leader, Wipro Limited.
- “ZEDEDA’s vision is to free cloud-native and legacy apps to run on any edge device anywhere in the world. This vision drives our support for EdgeX Foundry and its mission of promoting open interoperability between edge devices. We’ve made our virtualization solutions compatible with EdgeX releases because we believe they will have a central role in our industry’s future.” – Joel Vincent, VP Marketing, ZEDEDA
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 8, 2019 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Organizations
I’ve been off for most of the past week celebrating Independence Day and family birthdays. For those of you in the US, I hope you had a restful time off and enjoyed some fireworks displays. And now, back to what’s happening in the industrial world.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) comprises far more than just the simple connecting of devices back to a database in a server. It’s integral to digitalization. Applying abundance thinking to the system, clearly IIoT plays a key role for successful business transformation.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has produced the IIoT Maturity Assessment, a web-based tool included in the IIC Resource Hub that enables users to better understand their enterprise IIoT maturity. The IIoT Maturity Assessment helps organizations become best-practice adopters of IIoT by guiding business managers through a range of questions about the adoption, usage and governance of IIoT within their organizations.
“The IIoT market has grown quickly and many businesses planned strategy while in the midst of execution and need to step back and assess their true IIoT maturity,” said Jim Morrish, Co-Chair of the IIC’s Business Strategy and Solution Lifecycle Working Group and co-author of the IIoT Maturity Assessment tool. “The IIoT Maturity Assessment will help companies get a baseline for their maturity right now and assess it in regular intervals to track their progress.”
This framework of four main dimensions and their corresponding strands will spur your thinking into broader areas beyond predictive maintenance or cost reduction programs.
The framework:
Business Strategy
- Business model innovation and refinement
Business Solution Lifecycle
- Interface to business strategy
- In service monitoring and feedback
Technology
- Reference architecture and standards
- Data location transparency
Security
“There’s a real difference between using IIoT to streamline processes and using it to create new revenue streams or make better business decisions,” said Ian Hughes, Senior Analyst, Internet of Things, 451 Research. “A tool like this can be a real eye opener for an organization wanting to transform their business to remain competitive and increase profits.”
The IIoT Maturity Assessment considers 63 individual capabilities, each with five levels of maturity within the above framework. For example, under strategic context, a maturity level can range from a limited number of key individuals having stepped up to IIoT ownership to full ownership of IIoT within an organization. The IIoT Maturity Assessment provides feedback about the level of maturity and highlights areas that may require development.
The final outputs provided to users also provide links to the IIC Body of Knowledge for reference and to help improve their maturity. This includes collaborative resources developed by industry leaders from the IIC membership, including IIC foundational documents (Industrial Internet Reference Architecture, Industrial Internet Security Framework, Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework, Business Strategy and Innovation Framework, Industrial Internet of Things Analytics Framework, and Vocabulary Technical Report) and other IIC documents and tools.
The IIoT Maturity Assessment is available in three levels of analysis: Quick, Standard (both open to everyone) and Detailed (IIC members only).
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 3, 2019 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Networking
I’ve been writing about how IT companies are taking their powerful compute platforms to the edge. Here is a balance view from an industrial network switch company combining LTE with Ethernet and embedding HMI/SCADA. Interestingly, it includes Node-RED and MQTT support.
ORing has released a new industrial dual 4G LTE M2M IoT gateway that includes Ignition Onboard and Ignition Edge Onboard. The industrial-grade design is compliant with requirements of IEC 61850-3.
The new gateway has built-in 8-port Gigabit Ethernet with 4×10/100/1000Base-T(X) and 4xGigabit SFP Combo ports. It also includes Ignition Onboard and Ignition Edge Onboard, for easy use of the powerful, web-based Ignition platform for human-machine interface (HMI), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Node-RED is also onboard, along with support for MQTT and other protocols. The Gateway is AT&T-certified and can be purchased with a bundled SIM card and LTE data plan.
The company has extensive experience in switch and wireless product design. ORing’s products have been deployed in surveillance, rail transport, industrial automation, power substations, renewable energy, and marine applications.
Ignition by Inductive Automation is an industrial application platform with numerous tools for building solutions in HMI, SCADA, and IIoT.
“We’re very pleased to see Ignition and Ignition Edge as part of this new product from ORing,” said Don Pearson, chief strategy officer for Inductive Automation. “Digital transformation is a big undertaking, and end users will certainly appreciate ORing making things easier for them.”
“We at ORing are very excited about the release of the innovative IGMG-P83244GC+-D4G IoT Gateway,” said Angus Shih, president of ORing Industrial Networking Corp. “This impressive technology includes the Ignition SCADA features and AT&T LTE cellular technology. This all-in-one gateway can provide powerful VPN cellular routing capabilities with database storage, Ignition, and Node-RED functions in one box to make IoT and SCADA applications deployment easier than ever before. It can also connect with Ignition servers and the most popular cloud platforms, including AT&T Dataflow, to build flexible edge-to-cloud IoT systems.”
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 19, 2019 | Industrial Computers, Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, Operations Management, Technology
This week is IT week in my study of how IT and OT are coming together. I am in Las Vegas at the annual Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) customer conference called Discover. This rather long post looks at many of the announcements that show how far HPE has come in its expansion into manufacturing.
An interesting point (and you can see some pictures on my Twitter feed @garymintchell) is that there is a manufacturing demo at the entrance into the show area this week. It demonstrates partnerships with PTC (CAD, augmented reality, and IoT), ABB (robotics in this case, more later), along with video and predictive maintenance analytics.
Following are summaries of a number of announcements at this very busy event that have an impact on manufacturing technology and use cases. HPE calls the Edge—meaning basically not in the servers.
Things announced included new edge solutions, research labs, and programs to simplify and accelerate Intelligent Edge adoption, enabling customers to create unique digital experiences and leverage analytics and machine learning to adapt to changes in real-time.
The new offerings and programs include:
- Major enhancements to Aruba Central, the only cloud-based platform that unifies network management, AI-powered analytics, user-centric service assurance and security for wired, wireless and WAN at the edge.
- Integrations and new turnkey edge-to-cloud solutions, delivered with ABB, Microsoft, Rittal, and PTC, enabling real-time intelligence and control in industrial environments.
- The Intelligent Edge and IoT Center of Excellence (CoE) and Labs, part of Hewlett Packard Labs, to develop and commercialize new capabilities and technologies that accelerate customers’ and partners’ Intelligent Edge journey.
Research suggests that over the next decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) and related data growth has an economic potential of up to $11 trillion per year. To capture this potential, organizations need to implement an Intelligent Edge, an architecture that is fully connected, secured, distributed and autonomous. However, to scale the Intelligent Edge across the value chain, organizations need solutions that secure and simplify deployment and management, converge operational technology (OT) with IT and address the lack of skills and funding.
“The edge has emerged as the new center of the digital universe, opening up opportunities for organizations to create new digital experiences and gain competitive advantage,” said Keerti Melkote, founder and president, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “Today, we announce innovations that will enable our customers to capitalize on these experiences and opportunities by dramatically simplifying, securing and accelerating the deployment of the Intelligent Edge.”
Unified cloud-based platform
Siloed network management solutions are creating complexity and increasing time to remediation. To accelerate IT operations and allow IT professionals time to focus on innovation, Aruba is making significant enhancements to Aruba Central. With these enhancements, customers will benefit from AI-powered network analytics, improved security and user-centric assurance for wired, wireless and WAN edge infrastructures from a single point of control. Significant advancements include:
Advanced AI-powered analytics and assurance capabilities based on Aruba NetInsight and User Experience Insight allow IT professionals to resolve infrastructure problems quickly before they impact the organization. Now integrated into the Aruba Central cloud-based platform, Aruba’s Analytics and Assurance capabilities deliver IT professionals a way to quickly remediate intermittent network issues while also proactively identifying how to optimize customers’ infrastructures to ensure optimal experiences.
Software-defined branch (SD-Branch) and SD-WAN, managed on Aruba Central, is now enhanced with improved branch management and orchestration capabilities to centrally define business-intent policies to meet the hybrid cloud connectivity needs for distributed enterprises and reduce operational costs. The new SD-WAN Orchestrator in Aruba Central makes it easier for IT professionals to deploy flexible and secure overlay topologies in a large-scale edge infrastructure, connecting thousands of branch locations with multiple data centers. Aruba Virtual Gateways now available for AWS and Azure, combined with orchestration, cost-effectively extends network and security policies to workloads running in the public cloud. The new SaaS prioritization feature not only enhances the performance of SaaS applications but also provides visibility about the end-user experience for business-critical applications, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.
Integrated in Aruba Central, Aruba ClearPass Device Insight provides IoT visibility and security via a single pane of glass, employing automated device discovery, and machine learning-based fingerprinting and identification. Used in conjunction with Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager and Aruba’s dynamic segmentation security capabilities, networking and security teams can automate unique policy enforcement down to each device and user.
New network management workflow enhancements are integrated into Aruba Central to accelerate device provisioning with an automated mobile app to deliver network health views and troubleshooting across all locations allowing IT to focus on delivering the needs of the business.
Flexibility in how to obtain and support edge infrastructure
To provide organizations more flexibility and choice in how they obtain and support their edge infrastructure, Aruba solutions are also available via HPE GreenLake for Aruba a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) subscription-based offering.
Turnkey edge-to-cloud solutions
In industrial environments, the Intelligent Edge requires an intricate interplay between sensors, actuators, networks, applications and infrastructures from edge to cloud. It also involves unique challenges including harsh environmental conditions, intermittent network connectivity and lack of qualified on-site staff. Consequently, such deployments are often costly, slow and vulnerable to security and reliability problems. To simplify, accelerate and secure deployments, HPE is launching pre-integrated turnkey edge-to-cloud solutions in collaboration with key industry partners:
The integration of ABB Ability Smart Sensor technology with Aruba access points is designed to deliver a scalable, high-performance wireless connectivity solution for operational technology (OT) equipment such as motors, mounted bearings and pumps. This allows industrial companies to capture valuable data and insights from their equipment to proactively monitor their condition and performance, and plan maintenance in advance in order to avoid costly and disruptive downtime.
Jointly developed by ABB, HPE, Microsoft and Rittal, the Secure Edge Data Center for Microsoft Azure Stack is the industry’s first enterprise-grade edge appliance for Microsoft Azure Stack, enabling real-time intelligence and action in harsh industrial environments, while providing seamless integration with Microsoft Azure. The appliance provides IP55-rated environmental protection, cooling, redundant power supply and distribution and automated management – allowing customers to run pre-configured, high-end enterprise applications in locations such as factories or oil rigs.
HPE Edgeline IoT Quick Connect dramatically simplifies the convergence of OT and IT, enabling customers to monitor and control OT equipment such as machines or motors in real time. Jointly delivered with Microsoft, HPE Edgeline IoT Quick Connect is based on the HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform, which connects OT devices, the HPE Edgeline EL300 Converged Edge System and Microsoft Azure IoT, a collection of cloud services to connect, monitor and control IoT assets.
Fast Start Condition Monitoring enables customers set up condition monitoring within 90 days to deliver performance and availability of their OT equipment. An end-to-end solution implemented by HPE Pointnext Services, Fast Start Condition Monitoring is designed for customers who want to get started quickly with condition monitoring, but lack the skills to do so. HPE Pointnext Services help define use cases, OT data sources and workflows, and implement pilots for proof of value, based on HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems, the HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform and PTC’s ThingWorx Industrial IoT platform.
The newly established Intelligent Edge and IoT CoE & Lab provides critical capabilities and technologies to HPE’s partners and customers to accelerate Intelligent Edge adoption. It will guide partner activities, M&A and research in the following areas:
- Knowledge transfer to HPE’s channel partners to accelerate market adoption of the Intelligent Edge with the Channel to Edge Institute (CEI), a program which helps HPE’s channel partners gain the required expertise to effectively recommend, sell, implement and manage Intelligent Edge solutions for their customers. The CEI provides training on Intelligent Edge use cases and business cases and will deploy joint go-to-market programs with HPE’s channel and ecosystem partners.
- Research programs to drive rapid commercialization of Intelligent Edge technologies that simplify edge-to-cloud management and OT-IT convergence and enable new use cases – this includes, among others, a unified provisioning, policy and security management across wired networks, Wi-Fi and 5G; the next generation of HPE’s first-of-a-kind HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems and HPE Edgeline OT Link Platform; and real-time video analytics for quality, security and customer experience applications.
