The Industrial Internet of Things
The industrial internet of things, or IIoT, is the use of the internet of things (IoT) technologies to enhance manufacturing and industrial processes.
Industrial IoT stands out as a category because there are no other domains in which the impact of a security breach so impactful, or the defenses so inefficient.
Many of the control networks which are running critical infrastructure and services in the industrial domain have no native security, and the people responsible for installing, operating and maintaining these systems are not typically cyber security experts. This makes the network prone to cyber threats and leaves the network vulnerable.
The category cuts across many industries including automotive, bottling, chemical, food processing, gas, manufacturing, material handling, mining and resource extraction, oil, paper, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, power generation, power distribution, pulp, transportation and waste water. Some military applications fall into the industrial category but impose additional security and performance requirements.
The diversity of the category means there is no such thing as a one size fits all industrial IoT solution. Each vertical, and sometimes sub-verticals, imposes its own certification, safety, regulatory, performance, EMI and/or construction requirements.
There are Various benefits of implementing IIoT
- Digital/connected factory
- Facility management
- Production flow monitoring
- Inventory management
- Plant Safety and Security
- Logistics and Supply Chain Optimization
It requires a dedicated strategy for collecting data from endpoints, storing it in an accessible format – whether in a data center or in the cloud – feeding it to the analysis engine, and having a way to turn insights from that analysis into actionable and timely information.
Instrumentation for production lines can let companies track and analyze their processes on an enormously granular level, asset tracking can give a quick, accessible overview of a huge amounts of material, and predictive maintenance can save companies big money by addressing problems before they have a chance to become serious – the number of potential use cases is vast, and growing by the day.
