World of Industrial Internet

Imagine that starting from tomorrow, you simply wouldn’t have any Internet access for the next week. Now extend the week to the rest of the year. That is the everyday experience of most of the industry outside the sexy tech companies.

This is the start of a series of blog posts peering into the familiar but yet still alien world of Industrial Internet. By deliberately focusing only on the big picture, we avoid technical myopia and instead focus on the fundamentals of Industrial Internet.

Today in 2017, it sounds almost unbelievable to live an unconnected life. Over 75% of the people living in the developed world use internet at least once a week and the number just keeps growing.

However, this familiar online world of cat videos and wisdom packed in 140 characters, the Consumer Internet, is just one side of the coin. Outside our pockets and homes exists another Internet, still in its infancy but growing exponentially every year.

Here I’m talking about the Industrial Internet, and just like the ubiquitous Internet access has changed our personal lives, the market changes brought by the Industrial Internet will drag even the most conservative smokestack industries to the 21st century, still kicking and screaming if needed.

The Industrial Internet is all about processes, and the early adopters are ushering in relatively basic applications that give quick payoffs. If the Internet rests on cute kittens, its industrial twin is a touch more complicated. It rests on four pillars: device connectivity, analytics, portals and identity and access management (IAM).

Device connectivity brings the industrial ‘things’ online, for example the trucks and containers of a logistics company. The data produced by the things is then fed to the next pillar, analytics.

Analytics do the hard part of distilling the ever-increasing mounds of raw data collected from the things into hard numbers, numbers that can be used in the business process to save on expenses and/or generate more revenue.

To manage the fleet of things, a portal offer a dashboard view to manage all the information produced by the previous analytics step, and provides a means to act upon it.

IAM keeps the previous three pillars standing. Power is nothing without control, and IAM makes sure that the data can be trusted to be authentic and that only authorised users can view it.

 

Contact Us now and hear how IAM can help secure your IoT solution or environment.