Industrial data fabrics also allow organizations to eradicate the complicated web of point-to-point connections and add context between the OT layer and IT layer. With an industrial data fabric acting as the unifying data and message broker, hyper connectivity can still be established between OT and IT systems across an organization’s geographic and enterprise network. It facilitates the on-premises-to-cloud data flow into a single, encrypted port rather than exposing hundreds of open ports like classical point-to-point protocols do.
By managing OT data following the fabric paradigm, industry can more easily analyze and secure it at a lower total cost of ownership. Moreover, this approach promotes industry compliance and audit trails, ensuring that sensitive data is safely protected, without silos getting in the way.
Eliminating data silos and adding context
Beyond cybersecurity, there are several benefits to eradicating data silos with a fabric-enabled data management strategy.
In years past, fragmented data management practices not only exacerbated cyber risk, but created data silos across the business. In these cases, data tended to be trapped in smart devices, SCADA systems or distributed control systems (DCS) or shared to the cloud without any context. Different departments or systems were tasked with maintaining their own separate databases, thus creating inefficiencies and hindering collaboration. However, as industry continues to embrace digital transformation and AI, the need for unified data access at any level of the organization is becoming even more important.
Industrial data fabrics allow companies to access important data with connections to devices, sensors, cameras and DCS/SCADA systems, as well as break down data silos among these technologies. By doing this, data is not just accessible across cloud, edge and on-premises environments, it will also have the necessary context.
What’s more, an advanced industrial data fabric is aware of a data’s source location and associated context, so the challenging, manual step of moving data and applying context afterward is eliminated. For data to be effective across the organization, it’s important to know where it comes from, when it was collected, what sensors it represents and more.
With the right data management strategy, hyper-connectivity across the organization can be achieved, without maintenance and cybersecurity headaches. As industry continues to take steps toward improving its cybersecurity posture and accelerating digital transformation initiatives, streamlined and centrally managed data paradigms will play an increasingly important role.
Companies prioritizing data management best practices at the data fabric level will shrink their attack surface and be better equipped to rely on their data to make insight-driven decisions about the business.
Dr. Nina Schwalb is vice president, Inmation Industrial Data Fabric, at Emerson’s Aspen Technology business.