Despite their different roles and end objectives, the emergence of The Edge has made it obvious that organizations can benefit immensely by integrating the two worlds.
Increasingly, enterprises need to address domains like security, business analytics, services, and artificial intelligence, as wholistic continuums rather than silos of IT and OT. This will enable avenues for cost reduction, greater transparency, flexibility, and operational synergy. More important, the convergence of IT/OT systems will enable near-real-time decision making and has the potential to dramatically alter the way enterprises operate and use data for business management.
But before these vast opportunities for value creation can come to fruition, several key enablers need to be in place:
- A set of standards and governance approaches to align IT and OT
- Combined management and execution of cross-technology and business projects
- Alignment of duplicate and overlapping processes
- Development of inter-disciplinary skills within both domains
- Combining the split responsibilities between IT and OT, especially concerning security
- Single management and monitoring of the now separate infrastructures
Clearly, bridging IT and OT can be transformative for any enterprise. Arrow has been helping customers cross this chasm by driving transformation programs that involve using technologies and solutions across both IT and OT domains. In fact, given our 83-year history, we are one of the few companies with expertise in both areas. The next few years will be certainly interesting as we see more devices deployed at the edge and more connected IT and OT systems coming together to benefit businesses, governments, and consumers. I am excited to help drive that transformation with my colleagues at Arrow.
In my last blog, “Peering over the Edge”, I mentioned the rise of The Edge as an important sphere of next-generation technology change. This change will fundamentally alter how we interact with and operate the things around us. Companies will need to alter the way they do business and the way they run their operations. A key element of such a transformation is bridging the gap between a company’s operational technology (OT) systems and their IT systems. Termed the OT-IT gap, efforts to integrate the two worlds are underway and many organizations are stepping up to help customers tackle this important yet complex challenge.
IT, of course, alludes to the networking of computers and devices to provide information. Enterprises have implemented systems to overhaul business operations and yield major improvements in business productivity and efficiency. While this has received most of the attention, another dimension of the computing revolution has occurred with far less fanfare. Manufacturing plants, industrial machines, and operational process have also been digitizing to better control processes and more efficiently produce goods. These systems constitute sensors, logic controllers, communication gateways and human-machine interfaces. Collectively, these are dubbed Operations Technology (OT). OT has different fault tolerances than IT and the consequences of failures can have catastrophic impacts. While this is not the only difference between IT and OT, this has been a primary reason for the gap between them. Typically, these systems are islands of control within the operation of an enterprise and seldom interact with the other parts of the digital organization. The figure below distinguishes the two both in terms of role in the enterprise and in stakeholder interests.
Comparison of IT & OT Roles in Enterprises
Despite their different roles and end objectives, the emergence of The Edge has made it obvious that organizations can benefit immensely by integrating the two worlds. Increasingly, enterprises need to address domains like security, business analytics, services, and artificial intelligence, as wholistic continuums rather than silos of IT and OT. This will enable avenues for cost reduction, greater transparency, flexibility, and operational synergy. More important, the convergence of IT/OT systems will enable near-real-time decision making and has the potential to dramatically alter the way enterprises operate and use data for business management. But before these vast opportunities for value creation can come to fruition, several key enablers need to be in place:
- A set of standards and governance approaches to align IT and OT
- Combined management and execution of cross-technology and business projects
- Alignment of duplicate and overlapping processes
- Development of inter-disciplinary skills within both domains
- Combining the split responsibilities between IT and OT, especially concerning security
- Single management and monitoring of the now separate infrastructures
Clearly, bridging IT and OT can be transformative for any enterprise. Arrow has been helping customers cross this chasm by driving transformation programs that involve using technologies and solutions across both IT and OT domains. In fact, given our 83-year history, we are one of the few companies with expertise in both areas. The next few years will be certainly interesting as we see more devices deployed at the edge and more connected IT and OT systems coming together to benefit businesses, governments, and consumers. I am excited to help drive that transformation with my colleagues at Arrow.
