How Are You Preparing Your Network Infrastructure for the Industrial Internet of Things?

You’ve probably heard the advice that’s being given around the manufacturing industry today: Manufacturers must eagerly adopt technological innovation to improve productivity to remain competitive.

This is why the Industry 4.0 initiative and the Internet of Things (IoT) has drawn the industry’s attention to the benefits of the data-driven enterprise. Expect manufacturing facilities to experience a seismic transformation in the coming years. But how you do you prepare for such earth-shattering change? What questions should you be asking yourself to prepare for it?

Jeff Lund, Belden’s Senior Director of Product Line Management – Industrial IT has outlined a 5-step process to prepare a manufacturing facility for the Industrial Internet of Things. It covers the following:

Step 1. Assess and Map Industrial Networking Infrastructure. Before you start to enhance your system, you need to understand what you already have. What are the connectivity (wired/wireless, bandwidth, reliability) and environmental requirements of current systems? What are the near-term goals in terms of functionality and data exchange? The end result of the assessment stage should be an accurate ‘map’ of your network’s infrastructure.

Step 2. Migrate / Update to Ethernet. The IIoT is built on industrial-hardened versions of the technologies that power the Internet. You’ll want Ethernet (wired and wireless) to be the foundation of your communications infrastructure, so for existing components – such as sensors, actuators and electric motors – that communicate using fieldbus, plan their migration to Ethernet.

Step 3. Update Network Design to Meet Best Practices. This step is where we recommend you pause to make sure your program meets established best practices and standards. Belden and its partners offer resources that can help in this process.

Step 4. Enhance Reliability and Resiliency with Defense in Depth. Cybersecurity has become a bigger and bigger challenge in industrial environments – and it isn’t just about protecting against attacks by hackers. The majority of industrial cybersecurity incidents are unintentional, resulting from human error, device flaws and accidental malware introductions. The IIoT, with its more-things-connecting-in-more-ways, only makes the cybersecurity challenge more important.

Step 5 Monitor for Changes. The last step is a feedback loop into the first. Technology is constantly changing. Security threats are changing. Business needs are changing. You need to monitor all of these things and make changes to your systems accordingly.

What do you think? What have you done on the job to prepare for the Industrial Internet of Things?

How have you and your colleagues worked through the process of assessing your network infrastructure and developing a plan to update and enhance it to be prepared for an Internet-connected Industrial Facility?

If you are going through this process, what questions are you asking to get through the process?

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