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IT/OT Convergence

Bridging plant networks and business networks — at a point when the industry still assumed they were separate problems for separate departments.

Also known as OT/IT, Operational Technology

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 13 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Converging operational technology with the enterprise network across manufacturing, utility, public works and building estates.

At Georgia-Pacific this meant process control and SCADA networks alongside building and facility systems — HVAC, access control and video — at a point when plant networks and business networks were still widely assumed to be separate problems belonging to separate departments. Bridging them raises questions of segmentation, availability and who owns a change window that the industry only later gave names to.

Manufacturing OT tends to fail quietly rather than dramatically: every system works, and none of them can answer a question that spans two of them.

Subtopics

  • Asset Modeling & Naming StandardsOne hierarchy that supervisory control, historian and reporting all refer back to — the cheapest governance available, and the hardest thing on an estate to retrofit.
  • Building Automation & Physical SecurityHVAC, access control, video and fire panels converged with the enterprise estate — and a PoE lighting question most pilots never ask.
  • Energy Management SystemsReal-time telemetry from generating plants in China and Australia back to a monitoring center in Florida.
  • Hospitality PMS IntegrationGuest networks as a revenue line — walled-garden entry, metering, and posting marina shore power to a room account.
  • Manufacturing Line IntegrationMachine-level visibility across legacy production islands on a medical device manufacturing floor.
  • SCADA & Utility Control SystemsWater treatment and wastewater control across a utility estate, with redundant control sites — where the stakes are physical rather than informational.

Applied in

Through subtopics

7 further projects reference a subtopic of this entry rather than the entry itself.

Career

See also

Also searched as

  • IoT
  • Internet of Things
  • Industrial IoT
  • IIoT
  • M2M
  • machine to machine
  • OT security
  • ICS security
  • Purdue model
  • IT/OT segmentation

Instrumented plant, metering, roadside and building devices reporting over a network — the practice the term was coined for, two decades before it had the name.