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Will Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Improve the IIoT?

Is current Internet technology sufficient for the needs of Industry 4.0 or the IIoT?  Or could it be better?  How can we enhance Ethernet to improve real-time data communications? These are the kinds of issues that some key players in Industrial IoT plan to address by developing the world’s first time-sensitive networking (TSN) infrastructure.

TSN has been defined as “a set of IEEE 802 standards designed to enhance Ethernet networking to support latency-sensitive applications that require deterministic network performance,” according to Mike Baciodore in a recent article in Control Design titled “How time-sensitive networking enables the IIoT

Put simply, the goal of TSN is to provide the IoT with the same kind of real-time performance that is now limited to individual machines like cars and airplanes, or to distributed control systems in industrial applications.  The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), along with Intel, National Instruments, Bosch Rexroth, Cisco, Schneider Electric and others have joined forces to achieve this goal, to enable a truly real-time IoT.

TSN is Good News for Skkynet

This collaboration to develop TSN comes as good news to us here at Skkynet.  Since we currently provide secure, bidirectional, supervisory control capabilities over TCP, we understand how much more effective our software and services will be when supported by TSN.

With TSN, our latencies of a few ms over Internet speeds would be reduced to simply a few ms.  Data dynamics would be better preserved, and system behavior more deterministic.  This effort to develop TSN validates our thinking that the IIoT works best with low-latency, high-speed networking.  Unlike those who operate on the assumption that web communication technology (REST) is the way forward, the TSN approach means that networked data communications can approximate or equal in-plant speeds and latencies.

Several participants and commentators on the TSN project point out that typical cloud architectures are not ideal counterparts for TSN.  Something fundamentally different is required.  Putting their individual ideas and suggestions together, what they envision for an architecture is remarkably close to what Skkynet currently provides.  It should be secure by design, fully integrate edge computing, and keep the system running without interruption during any network outages.  Above all, it must provide secure, selective access to any process data, in real time.

“One of the cool concepts out there is that people will want to have a cyberphysical representation of the equipment in the cloud,” said Paul Didier, solutions architect manager at Cisco. “That doesn’t mean the physical plant will be controlled in the cloud. Optimization and maintenance can be done in the cloud and will filter its way back to the machine.”

Our recent case study showcasing DataHub and SkkyHub technology illustrates this “cyberphysical representation.”  During the deployment and test of a mineral processing system, developers thousands of miles away monitored the machine logic and tweaked the system in real time. “It was as if we were sitting beside them in the control room,” said one of the team, “and through live monitoring, we were able to continue developing the application, thanks to the real-time connectivity.”

It’s a small step from this to machine control, and time-sensitive networking will be a welcome technology in that direction.  To the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and everyone else involved in this project, we say keep up the great work!  We’re ready to put TSN to good use when it becomes available.

Industrial IoT, Big Data & M2M Summit―Takeaways

Last week several of us here at Skkynet had the pleasure to attend and present a case study at the Industrial IoT, Big Data & M2M Summit in Toronto.  IoT specialists representing a wide range of industries, from mining, manufacturing, and energy to telecom and software gathered to share insights and learn from collective experience how to get the most out of Industrial IoT.

Challenges to IoT adoption was a key topic of discussion.  There was considerable agreement among summit participants that one of the primary challenges is not technical, but cultural.  Switching from software ownership to data as a service requires a new mind-set, which not everyone is willing to adopt.  Speaker after speaker underlined the need to communicate value and get buy-in from all concerned parties. You should start with a small pilot project, with minimal investment, and demonstrate ROI.  Other challenges discussed included incompatible protocols and security risks.

Summit Theme: Partnerships

A common theme that prevailed in presentations and comments throughout the summit was that the IoT casts such a wide net that nobody can do all of it well.  We need to work together.

“IoT is all around partnerships,” said Christopher Beridge, Director of Business Development – IoT and Business Solutions at Bell Mobility.

“A lot of people have a part to play when you are talking IoT,” according to Matthew Wells, Senior Product General Manager at GE Digital.

“Smartness depends on how interconnected you are,” commented Steven Liang, Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, and conference chair.

Above all, there was agreement that the IoT is here to stay. “Our focus is to make things more efficient, reliable, affordable, and convenient, and the IoT is a way to do it,” said Michael Della Fortune, Chief Executive Officer of Nexeya Canada.  “It powers and upholds the 4 Vs—Variety, Volume, Velocity, and Veracity—of Big Data.”

Perhaps Timon LeDain, Director, Internet of Things at Macadamian summed it up best when he said, “IoT will be done by you, or done to you.”

Will IT and OT Converge?

It’s no secret down on the shop floor, or in the upper echelons of management, that IT and OT don’t always see eye to eye. For decades, the business computing world of Information Technology (IT) has been growing and evolving separately from the Operational Technology (OT) world. Plant engineers and system integrators working in the OT sphere are happy to keep their distance from the requirements and constraints of the IT department, going so far in many cases as to function on completely separate physical networks. Most executives, for their part, are reasonably satisfied to let the OT people do their work, and simply receive regular production reports from an ERP or possibly a MES system.

There are good reasons why these two siblings of IT and OT have grown up separately, despite their common parentage in computing technology. Yet now, increasing demands within and outside the enterprise are starting to force them to cooperate, and possibly even live under one roof. Exactly when and how this will happen may vary depending on the company and other factors, but it’s a trend that analysts such as Gartner and ARC Advisory Group predict will increase significantly in the next few years.

Much of this anticipated overlap (or collision) of IT and OT is due to advances in technology. On the OT side, Industry 4.0 and the Industrial IoT have become viable as the Internet becomes more reliable, and the cost of connecting devices drops exponentially. In the IT world, the lure and promise of Big Data and the analytical tools needed to extract value from it are moving quickly from the status of luxury to necessity. Heeding the lessons learned from the demise of Kodak and Blockbuster, executives understand the need to stay competitive in the digital age, or suffer the consequences.

Two Worlds of IT and OT

It is no accident that IT and OT seem to occupy two different worlds. You can trace this back to the primary goal of each. The focus of IT people is business improvement—to support accounting, logistics, human resources, and all other areas of the business to make it more effective and productive. In a sense, for IT, the product is the business itself. Upgrades to computer systems and improvements in skills pay off with immediate results in the success of the business. And it’s easy to make improvements because critical data is relatively static, providing ample opportunities to upgrade the tools and skills needed to manipulate the data.

In the OT world, the focus is on doing or making things. The production process is paramount. Complex factory systems, pipelines, power grids, and chemical plants cannot be switched on and off easily. Many systems run 24/7, and cannot be put on pause for software upgrades. Every hour of lost production time can cost millions. It may take months or years to build such a system, and once it is running, few engineers are willing to risk swapping in a piece of untested software. Computer skills are just one aspect of a project where the bulk of the expenditure and expertise is focused on the machinery and devices needed to do the work. OT is one of several players in the game, and not the star of the show that IT often becomes in its world.

Be that as it may, these two worlds are now poised to make contact. Businesses are waking up to the value of the data that’s coming from the production systems. Managers are discovering within OT data opportunities to harness real-time analytics and leverage predictive technologies that IT can provide. In a recent article, The Internet of Things: Bridging the OT/IT divide, John Pepper, CEO and Founder of Managed 24/7, said, “Unless organisations actively bridge the gap between OT and IT, the real operational benefits of the digital business will be lost.”

Bridging the Gap

As we understand it, there are at least three approaches to bridging the gap between IT and OT:

  1. Insert IT into OT. You can either import IT staff and expertise into the OT world, or build it in from the ground up. So far, this has not been a popular approach.
  2. Absorb OT into IT. Essentially this means expanding the IT world to encompass OT. Again, it may sound interesting in theory, but apparently the differences are too great, because we don’t see this happening much in practice.
  3. Allow OT and IT to communicate. For now, data communication seems to be the favored approach. Time will tell if this becomes a permanent necessity, or whether the two worlds can eventually merge.

For the foreseeable future, any convergence of IT and OT will continue to take place through data communication. What form does and will this communication take? Clearly OPC plays and will continue to play a major role. The key to OPC’s success to date has been its ability to foster communication between disparate systems. The large installed base of OPC Classic provides an easy way to obtain data from a wide range of systems. OPC UA is positioned as the data protocol for Industry 4.0 and the Industrial IoT. Whatever protocol may be used, and whatever form it takes, successful data communication between IT and OT must provide security, integration, and real-time performance.

Security is a major concern for OT professionals when considering connections to IT systems. For decades OT has usually been either physically separated from corporate IT networks, and/or functioning under the “security through obscurity” principle. The increasing number and sophistication of hacks to online industrial plants and power systems, along with the ability of viruses like Stuxnet to contaminate even an isolated system, underscore the need for an active and educated approach to security.

With this in mind, the best way to convince a prudent OT manager to share data with IT is to ensure the most secure connectivity scenario that is realistically achievable. The data communication protocol, such as OPC UA, should provide robust connectivity over TCP, and implement SSL and certificates. Keeping the plant’s firewalls closed and utilizing DMZs and proxy servers are essential for eliminating potential points of entry. Ideally, the system should be secure by design, and not need to rely on VPNs or additional security hardware. In fact, there is no need for IT to have any access to the plant at all, just the data. And access to that data should be restricted to just those in IT or management authorized to use it.

Seamless integration of data protocols is a second requirement for IT / OT convergence. OPC provides a way for the vast array of industrial protocols to be integrated into a single protocol. Converting OPC Classic to OPC UA will be needed to include legacy equipment in the conversation. To fit into the IT world of SQL databases, the ability to convert to ODBC is a must. And let’s not forget the IT world’s personal tool of choice: Excel. These are some of the more popular data protocols as a starting point; there may be others. The better the integration of OT data into familiar tools for IT, the more likely the IT and OT worlds will get along.

Finally, real-time performance is a big plus, if not an absolute necessity. Real-time data coming directly from the factory floor is one of the primary reasons for the whole project. This is the data that will power the real-time analytical engines and predictive technologies that management envisions, and that IT will be implementing.

Will we ever see IT and OT converge? It is difficult to say at this early stage. The trend right now is to open channels of data communication between the two. Success in these initial endeavors may inspire players on one side or the other to expand beyond their limited domains, and work towards a more fundamental level of integration. For now, professionals in both OT and IT can start by implementing secure, integrated, real-time data communication, and see where that leads.

New Whitepaper: Will IT and OT Converge?

It’s no mystery what “IT” stands for: Information Technology, the computing power used to run businesses and corporations. Fewer people might know that “OT” in this context stands for Operational Technology, the computing power behind modern industrial production systems. A new white paper from Skkynet asks whether IT and OT will converge.

These two, IT and OT, are worlds apart in most businesses. The IT people use computing resources to support accounting, logistics, HR, and all other areas of the business. In a sense, the product of IT is the business itself. IT becomes a star of the show. In the OT world, the focus is on doing or making things. The product is the process, or the manufactured output. OT is one of several players in the game, operating primarily in a supporting role, to ensure that mechanical systems function as designed.

For a long time, OT and IT have functioned separately from each other. OT has been hidden away in the deep recesses of the plant or out in the field, using its own proprietary data protocols, and often physically disconnected from the rest of the corporate network. IT has been content to get occasional updates on factory floor status through paper reports, database entries, or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems.

Now these two worlds are beginning to make contact. Businesses are waking up to the value of the data that’s coming from the production systems. Managers are discovering within OT data opportunities to harness real-time analytics and leverage predictive technologies that IT can provide. John Pepper, CEO and Founder of Managed 24/7, recently wrote, “Unless organisations actively bridge the gap between OT and IT, the real operational benefits of the digital business will be lost.”

Our new white paper, Will IT and OT Converge? takes a closer look at some of the concepts introduced by Pepper. It clarifies the distinctions between IT and OT, presents current thinking about how they might converge, and highlights three critical requirements from the OT side for bridging the gap: security, ease of integration, and real-time performance.

Skkynet and Partners to Host Seminar: “Technology and Business for the IoT Era”

Industry leader seminar to share best practices for translating the vison of Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 into practical reality.

Mississauga, Ontario, June 7, 2016 – Skkynet Cloud Systems, Inc. (“Skkynet”) (OTCQB: SKKY), a global leader in real-time cloud information systems, working with partners of the ThunderCloud Alliance, will host a seminar “Technology and Business for the IoT Era” at the UDX Conference Center in Tokyo, Japan, on June 9, 2016.  Leaders from academia, research, data communications, and embedded device manufacturing will collaborate on cutting-edge technologies and business practices that will allow corporations to extract maximum value from the IoT (Internet of Things).

“Each of our partners in the ThunderCloud Alliance plays a key role in the development of IoT architecture and technology,” said Paul Thomas, President of Skkynet. “This seminar is an opportunity for us to develop and share a collective approach to realizing some of the outstanding opportunities that the IoT promises.”

Executives, academics, and experts from organizations including Nagoya Institute of Technology, Kaspersky Labs, Red Lion Controls, Inc., OPC Foundation, TOA Musendenki Co., Ltd, BellChild Co., Ltd, Nissin Systems, Co., and Puerto Co. Ltd. will be leading discussions focused on IoT security, innovation, interoperability, and business models. Each party has been actively involved in developing the architecture and technology to support industrial IoT applications, and can point to real-world examples of their success.

The ThunderCloud Alliance, West was formed by Skkynet in December 2013 to provide a turn-key, real-time sensor-to-cloud service for the industrial M2M (Machine to Machine) market. Working in close association with TOA Musendenki, Nissin Systems, BellChild, NiC, KOBATA Gauge, Puerto, Haneron and Direx, Skkynet’s role is to furnish the real-time data connectivity technology necessary to make cloud-based M2M communication and the Industrial IoT a reality.

About Skkynet

Skkynet Cloud Systems, Inc. (OTCQB: SKKY) is a global leader in real-time cloud information systems. The Skkynet Connected Systems platform includes the award-winning SkkyHub™ service, DataHub®, WebView™, and Embedded Toolkit (ETK) software. The platform enables real-time data connectivity for industrial, embedded, and financial systems, with no programming required. Skkynet’s platform is uniquely positioned for the “Internet of Things” and “Industry 4.0” because unlike the traditional approach for networked systems, SkkyHub is secure-by-design. Customers include Microsoft, Caterpillar, Siemens, Metso, ABB, Honeywell, IBM, GE, BP, Goodyear, BASF, E·ON, Bombardier and the Bank of Canada. For more information, see http://skkynet.com.

Safe Harbor

This news release contains “forward-looking statements” as that term is defined in the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Statements in this press release that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements, including beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future, and results of new business opportunities. Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors, such as the inherent uncertainties associated with new business opportunities and development stage companies.  Skkynet assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements. Although Skkynet believes that any beliefs, plans, expectations and intentions contained in this press release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that they will prove to be accurate. Investors should refer to the risk factors disclosure outlined in Skkynet’s annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and other periodic reports filed from time-to-time with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Survey: Valuable Lessons from IoT Early Adopters

A recent survey by Machina Research (Lessons Learned from Early Adopters of the IoT: A Global Study of Connected Businesses) suggests that the IoT is moving quickly from novelty to necessity. Nearly two thousand management-level employees in companies earning $15 million and up per year in the USA, UK, Japan, Australia, and Brazil representing all major sectors of industry took part.  About 20% of the respondents have started some kind of IoT initiative, and close to 30% expect to do so in the next 6 months to 2 years.

Focusing on the innovators and early adopters of the IoT, the survey gleaned some useful information which may be helpful for those who have not yet implemented a strategy—and in many cases, those who have.  It seems that the majority of early adopters of the IoT took a do-it-yourself approach, and most of them found the IoT more complicated to implement than they expected. Future adopters say they will not repeat that mistake.

“When asked about primary concerns around IoT, adopters have some insight that non-adopters just don’t yet have,” states the report. “Adopters point to ‘complexity of the IoT solution’ as the largest concern around IoT, a concern that non-adopters have yet to consider fully.” Among those who have taken IoT initiatives, over half of them mentioned concerns about complexity, compared to only a quarter of those who have not yet taken the first step.

Other top concerns included security, ease of integration with existing systems, and the expense of implementation. These commonly-held concerns are undoubtedly part of the reason for the reluctance of others to undertake IoT projects on their own.  The majority of them responded that they are planning to work with an IoT-capable partner.

“Based on past experience of our adopters, companies who haven’t yet adopted IoT initiatives should not go it alone,” the report recommends. “Instead they should focus on finding partners whose core competency is connecting products securely.”

The report suggests that an ideal partner should not only have a technology platform, but should be able to simplify the complexity of the IoT.  They ensure that security is not an ad-hoc afterthought, but instead is inherent to the design of the system itself.  The partner should be able to easily integrate the IoT solution with existing and legacy systems, and offer significant cost savings and ROI.