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Technology Report: IT, OT and a New Era of ProductivityAt the heart of digital transformation is the concept of IT/OT convergence. In short, getting the data and the machines

(and the people who work with the data and the people who work with the machines) in sync to optimize performance.

Better data makes machines run smarter. Smart machines produce better data. IT and OT are not traditional bedfellows,

but then this whole approach to manufacturing is a break from tradition. It’s called a transformation, after all.

TECHNOLOGY REPORT


TECHNOLOGY REPORT

CONTENTS

New ideas about legacy systems

Transforming the plant floor with digital data

Insights on melding minds and machines

The path to secure network infrastructure

Exponential IT/OT convergence will change industry

Bridge the gap between OT and IT


TECHNOLOGY REPORT: IT/OT CONVERGENCE

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New ideas about legacy systemsBy Matt Newton, director of technical marketing with Opto 22

The greatest challenge with actually putting OEE applications into play is sharing information between OT and IT systems. (This is probably not breaking news to any readers.)

A lot of legacy operations technology was never designed to interface to IT systems. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that there are already hardware and software tools available, like Node-RED, REST-ful APIs and edge-computing platforms to start con-necting these systems. What’s even more interesting is that a lot of these tools are coming out of open-source initiatives, which means it’s easy to get started with them without having to invest a lot of time or money.

One of the recent developments on the communi-cation/integration standards front is the creation of the EdgeX Foundry, an open-source project hosted by The Linux Foundation, building a common open framework for IoT edge computing and an ecosys-tem of interoperable components to unify the market-place and accelerate enterprise and industrial IoT.

The EdgeX framework makes it easy to create IoT-edge solutions that have the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs. As a continued step in the company’s long history of supporting and adopting open standards and specifications in the industrial-automation and process-control markets, Opto 22 recently announced it has joined EdgeX Foundry as a founding member.

The application of cutting-edge open-source technology to legacy systems, devices and problems continues to excite me, along with exploring how we can digitally merge assets to literally make the world a better place.

We’re connecting a massive pool of talent in the developer community to previously untapped technology that could make a huge impact on our everyday lives. I can’t wait to see what IT/OT conver-gence will bring to industry, medicine, energy and to discover how IIoT impacts all of these different markets.

We’re connecting a massive pool of talent in the developer community to previously untapped

technology that could make a huge impact on our everyday lives.



Transforming the plant floor with digital dataBy Keith Larson, Smart Industry vice president of content

“Old digital Neanderthals like me talk about digi-tal transformation on the manufacturing floor, but young digital natives talk about digital transforma-tion of the plant floor,” said Dennis Hodges, CIO of Inteva Products, a large, global automotive supplier, mostly serving vehicle manufacturers. “To us, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is connected stuff—machines talking to machines, machines talk-ing to people, and vice versa. IIoT includes data man-agement, applications, people, global networks and intelligent devices. The main question is what big project and purpose do we want it to do?”

Hodges and Jon Sobel, CEO and co-founder, Sight Machine, presented “Impactful digital transforma-tion on the manufacturing floor: what works and why” at the Smart Industry conference. Purpose-built for discrete and process manufacturing, Sight Ma-chine’s analytics platform uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics to address quality and productivity challenges.

Hodges reported that, while global networks and security are important to many users, simple data management is not a topic that gets talked about a lot. “ERP gives a backflash view of the shop floor with help from XML and MES, but a lot of good data gets lost in various buckets.

“XML can be the worst data prison,” Hodges add-ed. “MES can gather data on parts production and operating parameters, but devices have more infor-mation on operating and environmental parameters, such as how long it took to get to the right torque or operating temperature.”

BIGGER DATA

Hodges explained that big data technologies can give a more comprehensive view of shop-floor ap-plications by getting out and getting closer to sensors and data acquisition systems. “This is where Sight Machine really helps us analyze data, get a physical and logical view of our plant, and build an analyt-ics workbench,” he said. “This lets the three most important people—the plant, corporate and machine operations managers—look at data from the perspec-tive that each of them needs.”

To make big data and its analytics work, however, Hodges added it’s also vital to remove the walls be-tween operations technology (OT) and information technology (IT), so companies can work as one. “We do this, too. When Inteva was spun off from Delphi and GM, our OT and IT were joined, and then we brought in quality and engineering people, too,” he added. “This can change everything.

“For example, our digital transformation project includes our ERP system and extruder machines and equipment, which make rolled, synthetic-leather products for dashboards and doors. These devices make leather very quickly, have a high scrap rate, and stream out data that Sight Machine takes and sends to our ERP system. Previously, we had to do analysis after production, but now we’re closer to real-time. These analytics are improving our productivity and profitability.” Inteva is presently using Sight Ma-chine software on four extrusion machines that make Inteather at its plant in Metamores, Mexico, near Brownsvile, Texas.



“Previously, all of these production systems had manual data entry, and only captured partial data and production points,” added Sobel. “Now we’re captur-ing backend machine temperatures, oil pressures, extruder flows and pressures, and other parameters.” This information is sent from the extruder via its RS232 port to a local Sight Machine server on Inte-va’s plant floor for calculation and analysis, where the data is processed with Kepware software for bridging hardware and software applications and with a REST JSON API, which can take data in any form, run it though Sight Machine’s software engine, and send it via TCP/IP up to the cloud.

The triple acronym includes representational state transfer (REST) web services for interoperability

between computer systems on the internet; JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) open-standard format that uses human-readable text to transmit data objects; and application program interface (API), which is a set of software routines, protocols and tools for build-ing software applications.

“We can do calculations and analysis locally on the plant floor, or we can do it on the cloud with a service like Amazon Web Services,” added Sobel.

“Previously, we had to do analysis after production, but now we’re closer to real-time.” Inteva Prod-ucts’ Dennis Hodges discussed how the company’s implementation of plant-floor analytics is improving productivity and profitability by delivering timely, role-based information to operational stakeholders.

We can do calculations and analysis locally on the plant floor, or we can do it on the cloud with a service

like Amazon Web Services.



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Insights on melding minds and machinesBy Chris Misztur, software architect and IIoT evangelist with MacLean-Fogg Component Solutions

The IT/OT gap is not getting any narrower. What is happening to the gap is that it is becoming more visible and people like myself live inside the gap. It is necessary to have an official or unofficial digital trans-formation team and remain persistent.

When updating legacy systems, for example, there are two approaches you can take. One is to push the upgrade from the top down, like a corporate-wide ERP upgrade where the only choice a facility gets in the matter is who is next in line to receive the upgrade. The other approach is to find people that embrace change and find what it is they need to move the business forward.

Not only does the business come to you to solve their

problems with technology (which often doesn’t actu-ally solve the problem), but the business also wants to keep you at a fixed distance from the root cause of the problem, most often unknowingly. I have found myself in meetings where I was told to stick to the techno-logical and to leave the tactical to others.

The perception of IT as a support role is the great-est challenge to overcome. The best way to overcome this is to deliver on projects that make a big impact to the current pain points an operation is experiencing. Once that trust is built, people slowly change their minds and choose to include you as part of the solu-tion next time.

Since IT is most often a corporate role, you get to know people at various locations and you find that they are facing very similar problems. This presents you with a couple different opportunities. First is the ability to open lines of communication between similar roles at different locations, which gives you deeper

insight into operational challenges. Because of this insight, you are now in a position to

find a standard solution for everyone involved. If you are able to standardize a tech solution across the entire enterprise, you simplify your integration patterns and can spend more time executing than planning.

The perception of IT as a support role is the greatest challenge to overcome.



The path to secure network infrastructure

There is great power in building a secure network

infrastructure. There is also a lot of doubt about how to

begin this process. Rockwell Automation Networks and

Security Specialist Gregory Wilcox stresses the importance

of a reference architecture and establish a secure, scal-

able and robust network infrastructure to support IT/OT

convergence.

Smart Industry: Why are reference architectures important?

Gregory: Reference architectures help manufac-turers to reduce costs by simplifying their designs, accelerating their deployments and helping to reduce risks when deploying new technology.

Smart Industry: What is a challenge with deploy-ing a connected enterprise, which reference architec-tures can solve?

Gregory: Scalable, reliable, safe, secure and future-ready architectures are key tenets of a connected enterprise. The Converged Plantwide Ethernet reference architectures created by Cisco and Rockwell Automation are a collection of IT/OT-tested and validated architectures. They provide design considerations, best practices, documented test results and configuration settings to support the deployment of Industrial IoT and Industrial IT systems within a connected enterprise.

Smart Industry: What’s an example of data en-abling a better business decision?

Gregory: Although technology is the enabler for better business decisions, it’s the outcomes (such as analytics) that are the drivers behind Industrial IoT and Industrial IT. Industrial IoT enables smart devices, which are the genesis of data. Smart devices make up smart machines, which in turn make up smart manufacturing. Smart-manufacturing intel-ligence, enabled through analytics, helps to optimize yield and improve asset utilization.

Smart Industry: Is IT/OT convergence getting better?

Gregory: For the most part, IT/OT convergence is improving. From a technology perspective, there are increasing similarities between OT and IT architecture technology. From a cultural perspec-tive, there are still challenges. One challenge is the concept of service-level agreements (SLAs). For the OT side, SLAs are measured in minutes and hours, where it is common for IT SLAs to be measured in hours and days. The skills gap is another chal-lenge we are seeing. Companies that have embraced the potential business value of Industrial IoT must invest in education for their IT and OT teams—educating IT on operational requirements and educating OT on traditional enterprise-IT require-ments. There are a number of different educational resources to help ease this convergence, such as the network-design eLearning courses from Industrial IP Advantage.

Scalable, reliable, safe, secure and future-ready architectures are key tenets of a connected enterprise.



During the Smart Industry webinar “Marrying IT &

OT: Equipping Legacy Infrastructure for the IIoT,” Arlen

Nipper shared his expertise on convergence. Here the presi-

dent and CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions shares with us his

thoughts on the proper use of SCADA, embracing legacy

systems and capitalizing on the unique skills of the young

workforce. Take a look…

Smart Industry: Why does IT/OT convergence pose such a challenge?

Arlen: Historically IT and OT were completely siloed entities within organizations, with IT based around mainframe based/batch OS/LAN technologies and OT based around emerging microprocessor based/real-time OS/WAN compute technologies. But over time the legacy “technology” boundaries have disap-peared to the point where the compute and networking technologies are the same. But the challenge now is to overcome existing cultural boundaries while acknowl-edging the different roles and responsibilities that OT and IT departments have within an organization.

OT is responsible for the safe and reliable opera-tion of mission-critical control systems connected to a diverse population of devices in the field or on the plant floor. Skill sets include the knowledge of physi-cal interfaces to mechanical equipment these devices are connected to, and the 40 years of legacy protocol and interface technology these devices represent. 95% of existing OT infrastructures are brownfield and can only be upgraded with very careful migra-tion strategies that maintain operational safety while minimizing downtime. Frankly, OT systems don’t need to consider ALL information that might be available in existing field devices or sensors, but only

that information required for the safe monitoring and control of the system.

IT, on the other hand, is responsible to the enter-prise at large. Line-of-business solutions need to be able to provide timely and accurate information to decision-makers. For most companies in this sector, a large part of the information for those solutions needs access to operational information.

The whole notion of OT/IT convergence and no-tions of IIoT have come about because organizations have all determined that to be competitive in the market they need more operational information and they need that information in near real time. And this is really where the challenge is: conventional legacy SCADA technology places the SCADA host system squarely in series with all field devices that could be providing more information. Existing poll/response paradigms are continually putting OT in the unenviable position of trying to make their SCA-DA system the central point for all field information, whether they need that information or not. This was something that legacy SCADA systems were never designed to do.

The answer to the problem is to provide OT/IT with IIoT technology that can be understood, lever-aged, and utilized by both while satisfying the unique responsibilities of each.

Smart Industry: What are the benefits to be gained in properly marrying IT/OT?

Arlen: Everyone in the industry understands the benefits to be gained by combining the skills of their OT and IT departments. This is by no means a new revelation to the market, as many leading organi-

Exponential IT/OT convergence will change industry



zations have been trying leverage the strength of their OT/IT departments for the last 20 years. But with continual advancements in TCP/IP network availability, embedded Edge Gateway technology, message-transport technologies, and cloud comput-ing (you could say the ingredients of IIoT), the desire for a strategy to marry OT/IT is expanding at an exponential pace.

Better OT Systems—No company is going to change their OT SCADA system unless the provable benefits are dramatically better than current legacy SCADA infrastructures. Leveraging available IIoT technologies will make SCADA systems faster, more secure, and more reliable than the monolithic legacy SCADA host model that exists today. Until we can show the benefits of newer, IIoT-based SCADA infrastructures, the promise of IIoT and marrying of OT/IT will not happen.

Information Access—Once the benefits of a dra-matically better OT solutions can be proven, we can start to address the access to field-device information that has been stranded. Estimates are that 70 to 90 percent of all intelligent field-device and sensor data has been left stuck in field devices. Again, this was data not critical to a safe OT implementation, but rather information valuable to other line-of-business solutions in the enterprise. PLCs, RTUs, Flow Computers, Smart Sensors, network infrastructure equipment, etc. all have valuable process variables and metrics that, to date, have been left stranded because they were not critical pieces of information required by the SCADA application. IIoT technology will help to decouple devices from the SCADA appli-cation and start to make device information available

to multiple data-consumer solutions.Agility—Existing SCADA infrastructures have

been built up over the last four decades and have become very monolithic. To a large extent, over time they become so brittle that no one wants to change the way they work. But this situation stifles the ability to be agile and innovate new solutions within the enterprise. IIoT technologies offer the promise of being able to rapidly prototype, test, and innovate within the existing infrastructure while maintaining a safe, mission-critical SCADA solution.

Smart Industry: What are the opportunities/challenges that exist with interfacing to legacy field devices?

Arlen: It’s not so much an opportunity, but rather a requirement that we embrace existing legacy equip-ment. Although IIoT-centric field devices are already coming on the market, the fact is that equipment that is in place today will continue to be there for at least the next decade. The opportunity is that, done properly, interfacing with existing field devices will meet a large portion of the information requirements seen today while minimizing the cost associated with having to replace existing equipment. The challenge will be to select appropriate SCADA, IIoT, and Edge-of-Network gateway technology that will pro-vide the migration-strategy component to work with existing SCADA infrastructures, while providing the scalability and flexibility to access a much broader set of process and metric information that is already available. The ability to interface to existing field devices is probably the most important component in any IIoT migration strategy. Without this ability, any IIoT-enablement project will stall at the very outset.

The ability to interface to existing field devices is probably the most important component in any IIoT

migration strategy.



Smart Industry: Is the automation industry prop-erly using SCADA?

Arlen: The answers are yes and no. Yes. From a pure “Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition” stand-point most SCADA-system implementations are do-ing a very good job for what they were designed to do.

No. When a SCADA system is used to poll for data that it does not required just to be a “gateway” for field device data, it is being used to do something that it was never designed to do. To many SCADA systems have custom applications that sit behind them just for the purpose of accessing data that the SCADA system “didn’t need” but was asked to get on their behalf. This always results in custom SCA-DA-system implementations that become brittle, hard to upgrade, and in practical terms, monolithic custom applications.

Smart Industry: What is your impression of the skills capabilities of the young workforce regarding industrial IoT?

Arlen: It’s really more of a question around what is the IIoT market going to do the take advantage of the skills of a young workforce! As an industry, we’re working with 40-year-old technology. (Modbus was introduced in 1978!) We use a plethora of protocols that are complex, undocumented and have been modified and tweaked over the years. In many cases SCADA systems are proprietary and have expensive “developer seat licenses” that restrict general access to learning how they work. For rapid application-de-velopment, most legacy SCADA systems don’t offer a scripting language, and for those that do, many times it is a “in house” developed language that is cryptic,

hard to use, and even harder to maintain. It seems that we’re trying to keep barriers in place to intimi-date a young workforce entering the market and keep them in the dark.

On the other hand, the young workforce grew up in the digital age. Engineers coming into the work-force today are very familiar with the IT technology that runs the world and “expect” this technology would be available to them from an IIoT aspect. Need a rapid application developed today? Ok, I’ll write it in JavaScript or Python. What you do mean I have to “POLL” that field device? It is a computer-based device on a TCP/IP network, so can’t it just tell me when a process variable changes?

My impression of the skills capabilities of the emerging workforce is that they are more than capable, but we as an industry need to open up the system infrastructures (and no, not open up from a security aspect) and give them better tools to exploit their knowledge and skills within the IIoT sector.

Smart Industry: What most excites you about the near future of digital transformation?

Arlen: What excites me about the near future of the digital transformation from legacy SCADA/Te-lemetry systems to IIoT is that we’re finally seeing an emergence of open-source and highly available tech-nology that will start to really make a difference. One could argue that IIoT has been around for 40 years and we called it SCADA. But when we can start ap-plying well know “Internet of People” technology to the “Industrial Internet of Things,” we’ll start to see an exponential OT/IT convergence that will change the industry forever.

When we can start applying well know “Internet of People” technology to the “Industrial Internet

of Things,” we’ll start to see an exponential OT/IT convergence that will change the industry forever.



SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration.Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. © 2017 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved. G53934US.0517

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SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. © 2017 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved. G55606US.0617

A Non-Geek’s A-to-Z Guide to the Internet of Things

When the buzz around big data is all about connected devices, sensors and machine learning,

it can be a lot to process.

This easy-to-navigate guide includes 101 common Internet of Things terms and serves as a quick

go-to resource − explained in language anyone can understand − to help you get a handle on

all things IoT.

https://www.sas.com/en_us/whitepapers/non-geek-a-to-z-guide-to-internet-of-things-108846.html



Bridge the gap between OT and ITBy Naomi Price, conference content director at UBM’s Advanced Manufacturing Expos & Conferences

“Within a given enterprise are operational tech-nology systems and information technology systems. Both technologies and each set of systems were purpose-built, and neither was designed to work with the other.” So begins an essential section of the Opto 22 white paper, “Your IoT Primer: Bridge the Gap between OT and IT,” an accessible narrative on the parallel evolution of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) systems that includes an exploration of the standards, protocols and tools emerging as primary players in a flattened, converged architecture that brings both worlds together.

Both OT and IT function within the enterprise to create output (goods and services), the report continues. To create output most efficiently, they need to work together. But in today’s enterprise, there’s a significant communication gap between OT and IT technologies. Each uses its own methods of connectiv-ity, from the physical connectors and buses that data rides on, to the language each uses to convert bits and bytes into human readable and actionable information. Designed years ago, OT and IT technologies remain far apart today. During a keynote address at the Smart Industry conference, Richard Soley, executive direc-tor of the Industrial Internet Consortium, pointed out that ladder logic diagrams for PLCs used in discrete manufacturing in 1980 are very much like the ones used today. “Worse, though it’s got an internet port on it now, it doesn’t connect to the IT infrastructure of the plant.” Why not?

CONNECTIVITY COMES FIRST

For decades, industrial products have been designed for long life. As a result of this long lifecycle, industrial

devices installed today use varied physical communica-tion layers, mostly proprietary to their industry. For example, you may have a variable frequency drive on a serial network, a proportional valve on FOUNDA-TION fieldbus, and a proximity sensor on DeviceNet, each a different physical network.

One of the first steps in connecting legacy indus-trial systems to the IoT is to provide some type of conversion from these application-specific physical buses to open, ubiquitous physical interfaces such as Ethernet and wireless. We’ll also need to aggregate smaller, simpler devices like non-networkable sensors or electric circuits into a networked gateway device, in order to transmit the sensor-level signals onto standard network interfaces and then into the primary internet communications protocol: TCP/IP.

As a result of the purpose-built, application-specif-ic nature of manufacturing and automation systems, the vast majority of devices found on the plant floor today use their own custom and often proprietary protocols to meet application requirements. While a custom protocol can be useful in a single given applica-tion, for example closed-loop process control, it creates yet another hurdle in accessing the data required to realize the benefits IoT offers.

In contrast to OT, IT enterprise networks use the same open standards and protocols found on the inter-net. The internet was founded on open communication standards like TCP/IP. Application-specific protocols are layered on top: HTTP/S, SMTP, SNMP, MQTT, and so on. The internet uses programming languages like JavaScript, Java, and Python and presents infor-mation using technologies like HTML5 and CSS, all of which are open. To realize the promise of the inter-



net of Things, OT and IT technologies must converge, allowing connection and communication.

Perhaps in the short run, OT and IT can con-verge using solutions such as protocol gateways, OPC servers, and middleware. In the long run, however, OT/IT convergence will demand a flattened archi-tecture and seamless communication between assets, using open, standards-based communication protocols and programming.

IOT AT THE EDGE

As of today, billions of “things” already are con-nected to the internet, and their numbers are annually growing at a 30% clip. And all of these devices are generating data. Zettabytes of data. But is it useful data? And are modern networking technologies up to the task of moving that much data across the internet?

The IoT is going to produce increasingly mas-sive amounts of raw data from billions of sensors, actuators, and devices. How do we sort through the data to filter out what we need—to turn it into action-able information?

The answer lies in edge computing. The majority of IoT devices will be connected at the edge of the net-work, the place where OT and IT physically converge. The data that OT devices generate must be mined for what is useful to the enterprise and forwarded to cloud computing systems for big-data analysis; useless data must be discarded to reduce bandwidth requirements and noise. Unfortunately, most of today’s OT assets like individual sensors and machines don’t have the computing power required to process and filter the

data they generate. More intelligent OT assets like PLCs tend to focus on single-task automation func-tions and have not been designed to share that manu-facturing data with other systems. So the current IoT requires third-party systems that act as data brokers between OT and IT assets.

GIVE IT A REST

The real vision of OT/IT convergence is for autono-mous and direct communication—for assets, things, nodes, and servers to communicate directly with each other without the need for protocol gateways, OPC servers, and middleware. To enable direct asset-to-asset or thing-to-thing communication and truly bridge the OT/IT gap, manufacturers will push intelligence down directly into OT assets and enable those assets with IT communication capabilities, protocols, and languages.

We already see increased device capabilities as OT assets are beginning to be developed from the ground up with IoT applications in mind. Over time, we’ll see not only communication technologies but also increased intelligence, allowing assets on the edge to interpret and filter their own data into informa-tion, and then expose it via standard formats docu-mented as web APIs.

To fully realize the benefits IoT has to offer, OT assets will need to be designed with web technologies built directly into them. These RESTful architectures leverage HTTP for interaction, SSL/TLS encryption and authentication for data security, and JSON for data format. They’re available today, and destined for an Internet of Things application near you.

The real vision of OT/IT convergence is for autono-mous and direct communication—for assets, things,

nodes, and servers to communicate directly with each other without the need for protocol gateways,

OPC servers, and middleware.

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