Ganesh Bukka, Vice President and Global Head of Industry 4.0, Hitachi Digital Services
Data is considered to unlock operational efficiency and productivity. Instead, companies too often feel handcuffed and unable to act on the vast amount of information they generate. As IoT and the edge generate large amounts of operational technology (OT) data, and data collection and analysis feeding into information technology (IT) systems becomes increasingly sophisticated, explore ways to integrate these two important streams. More and more companies are doing so. Integrating OT and IT enables business agility, optimizes operations, strengthens your company’s competitiveness, and informs decisions to quickly seize new business opportunities.
But integrating OT and IT is a massive undertaking, and few companies have the in-house resources to achieve this holy grail of data enablement. Challenges are widespread across the industry. Organizations in the energy, rail, and manufacturing sectors are feeling the urgency to integrate data from these two sides of the company to increase visibility and better manage the data life cycle of critical assets.
To that end, Hitachi recently announced the creation of Hitachi Digital Services, a division of the technology giant launched to help organizations across various industry segments address these real-world challenges. With Hitachi Application Reliability Centers, Hitachi Digital Services brings a strong track record of success in helping organizations integrate their OT and IT to benefit the enterprises they serve and the end consumers.
Data integration supports intelligent decision making, which in turn supports business continuity.
This is not a theoretical discussion, so a real-world perspective is essential. This is a reality that plays out in real time every day in every manufacturing plant, power plant, and every corporate asset – millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of systems, equipment, and facilities. Despite their value, organizations struggle to effectively predict when their assets will require maintenance, are at risk of failure, or when a failure will bring down the power grid. Masu. Cybersecurity threats further complicate the equation.
Considering all these factors, companies need to have in place a complex network of subsystems with advanced sensors, sophisticated protocols, and precise monitoring capabilities. These solutions must integrate and harmonize data to optimize efficiency, productivity, and business continuity. It also enables companies to ensure interoperability between legacy and new-generation technologies and connect across business-enabling applications such as product lifecycle management, manufacturing, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and supply chain systems. Need to expand. Only when all these variables are addressed can data become a resource that can be accessed, interpreted, and worked around to avoid problems and align with production schedules.
Achieve OT and IT integration with an industry-experienced partner
Achieving this level of performance requires intelligent integration of OT and IT. The integration of OT and IT integration falls into three streams:
The depth of integration expertise required is beyond what most companies have available in-house, and many companies lack collaboration between business and IT departments. Even in companies with robust OT and IT departments, members of each team often struggle to incorporate the perspectives of other teams into their approach to building integrated solutions.
Through the Hitachi Application Reliability Center, Hitachi Digital Services provides industry-specific experience to external partners to facilitate, simplify, and manage the process of aligning all these considerations. The Hitachi Digital Services team has been working with customers on industry cloud accelerators that harmonize data and create a common data architecture. This is essential because even when companies struggle with what they perceive as unique data integration scenarios, the underlying issues are often universal. This means that with the right partner, there are often already proven use case-driven solutions and frameworks that can be customized to your challenges and specifications.
By working with their partners, organizations can optimize the collection, integration, and enrichment of information across the data lifecycle. A skilled and experienced partner can also help companies develop a mature data culture that respects and incorporates her OT and IT, which can be exposed to competition and conflict. Once a meaningful data culture is established with organization-wide data governance, companies have a foundation on which to build reliable operational systems to run the enterprise.
The results of this intelligent integration between OT and IT can be game-changing. Benefits that companies have realized by integrating through Hitachi Application Reliability Center include:
Integrating OT and IT delivers all of these benefits and more, enabling organizations to achieve the greatest possible business value from their data.
Learn more about how Hitachi Digital Services partners with businesses to unify OT and IT to enable informed decision-making.
This post was created by Hitachi Digital Services and Insider Studios.
