EMAIL INTERVIEW – Tony Paine and Ken Sinclair

Tony Paine, CEO, Kepware Technologies

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Sinclair:  What is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)?

Paine:  IIoT sets its sights on Internet-enabling all hardware and software components (the “Things”) that comprise an automation system. This will allow for smarter automation where Things can share information, learn about their surroundings, and auto-tune themselves to achieve optimum throughput and minimal downtime.

Sinclair:  What are the biggest challenges facing the IIoT?

Paine:  At Kepware we believe the following are the biggest challenges facing the IIoT:

• Identifying Things within the Internet - In order for Things to be able to communicate with each other, they need to be uniquely identifiable within the Internet.
• Discovering Things and the data they possess - A Thing should be able to restrict discovery of all or some of its data based on security requirements. Balancing ease of discovery with the rigid constraints of security will be fundamental to the success of IIoT and must be achievable without a PhD degree in cybersecurity.
  
• Managing massive amounts of data - These trillions of Things will produce something much larger than trillions of data points (industry currently measures this in zettabytes or 1021 bytes), all of which will need to be collected, analyzed, and possibly archived.
• Navigating connectivity outages - The Things that make up IIoT, as well as the communication mediums that link them together, will not be available 100 percent of the time. While some downtime may be scheduled, there will be physical or environmental changes that result in intermittent to long-term outages.
• Integrating existing infrastructure into new IIoT strategies - To achieve success in the areas of network optimization and third-party integration, complexities like security have largely been ignored. Given that the typical lifecycle for industrial Things exceeds twenty years, there will be an expectation to integrate the existing into new IIoT strategies.
  

Sinclair:  So how can companies alleviate some of these challenges?

Paine:  In order to alleviate some of the preceding challenges, IIoT strategies will focus on pushing data into a centralized cloud platform. This platform and its corresponding services will be administered by IT experts familiar with the managed world of IP and made available to anyone with the proper credentials and an Internet connection. Leveraging the power of cloud computing and its multitudinous resources will make the required storage and processing power available to handle the zettabytes of data that will be collected, analyzed, and archived. Furthermore, the overall uptime of these platforms continues to trend upwards as they become more resilient to the increasing demand and expectations of our connected world.

Sinclair:  What do you see as a solution?

Paine:  In order to seamlessly integrate industrial data into IIoT, a new communications platform is required. This platform requires extensive knowledge of the intricate realm of OT and the state-of-the-art and rapidly-changing domain of IT.

For more information on the Industrial Internet of Things and Communications at the Edge, download my eBook.