Dave Hammond is
Product Manager at
M.A.C. Solutions, who is
the preferred partner for
Kepware in the UK and
an Authorized Reseller in
France.
For more information or
to download the full white
paper “Industrial Internet of
Things and Communications
at the Edge” by Tony
Paine, CEO of Kepware
Technologies, please visit
www.mac-solutions.net
or www.kepware.com or
telephone MAC Solutions
on 01527 529774 or email
[email protected]
impediment, as Things become added at
an unprecedented rate.
Challenge 2: Discovering Things and the
data they possess
Once a Thing can be identified, the next
challenge is how other interested parties
will discover that it exists and what data
it possesses. Of course, a Thing should be
able to restrict discovery of some or all 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 in cyber security.
Challenge 1: Identifying Things within
the Internet
Challenge 3: Managing massive amounts
of data
In order for Things to be able to
communicate with each other, they
need to be uniquely identifiable within
the Internet. Historically, this has been
accomplished through a unique Internet
Protocol (IP) address. As industry looks
ahead to the trillions of Things that will
be connected, focus has been placed on
adopting the Ipv6 standard, which defines
a 128-bit address capable of uniquely
identifying 340 undecillionth (340 x 1036)
addressable items (compared with only
4 billion addressable items using today’s
Ipv4 standard).
These trillions of Things will produce
something much larger than trillions
of data points, all of which will need
to be collected, analysed and possibly
archived. Moving this amount of data
over the Internet will consume new
levels of bandwidth, which could result
in the degradation of service as well as
higher costs for Internet carriers, service
providers, and ultimately end users.
Moreover, archiving this data for future
analysis will require massive amounts of
data storage and a new generation of
scalable analytical applications capable of
honing in on individual points of interest,
in a timely manner.
This range will more than cover the
requirements of IIoT. However, it will be
difficult – if not impossible – to manage
this effectively on a global Internet scale.
Typically, such tasks have historically
been achieved by Naming and Number
Authorities, with the aid of Network
Administrators, but this will likely be an
Challenge 4: Navigating connectivity
outages
The Things that make up IIoT, as well as the
communication mediums that link them
together, will not be available 100 per
cent of the time, resulting in intermittent
or even long term outages. This could
severely impact systems where data loss
is unacceptable or where variances in the
data needs to be known in real-time.
Challenge 5: Integrating existing
infrastructure into new IIoT strategie s
For decades, Industrial Things have
made data accessible over private, site
networks, through the implementation of
open or proprietary protocols. And in the
past, complexities such as security have
largely been ignored, in order to achieve
optimisation and integration between
dissimilar industrial systems, within a
private environment. Given that the typical
lifecycle for industrial Things exceeds
20 years, there will be an expectation
to integrate the existing into new IIoT
strategies. Opening these private networks
and the data they contain to the Internet
will require detailed security assessments
to minimise risk of exploitation.
The promise of connecting
everything within an industrial
environment, to get complete
operational visibility and
allow for the best real-time
decisions, will transform how
we manufacture for years to
come. The premise for this
next industrial evolution is the
Industrial Internet of Things
(IIoT), says Tony Paine, CEO of
Kepware Technologies.