Industrial and manufacturing

Industrial IoT (IIoT) is one of the fastest and largest segments in the overall IoT space by the number of connected things and the value those services bring to manufacturing and factory automation. This segment has traditionally been the world of operations technology (OT). This involves hardware and software tools to monitor physical devices. Traditional information technology roles have been administered differently than OT roles. OT will be concerned with yield metrics, uptime, real-time data collection and response, and systems safety. The IT role will concentrate on security, groupings, data delivery, and services. As the IoT becomes prevalent in industry and manufacturing, these worlds will combine especially with predictive maintenance from thousands of factory and production machines to deliver an unprecedented amount of data to private and public cloud infrastructure.

Some of the characteristics of this segment include the need to provide near real-time or at real-time decisions for OT. This means latency is a major issue for IoT on a factory floor. Additionally, downtime and security are a top concern. This implies the need for redundancy, and possibly private cloud networks and data storage. The industrial segment is one of the fastest-growing markets. One nuance of this industry is the reliance of brownfield technology, meaning hardware and software interfaces that are not mainstream. It is often the case that 30-year-old production machines rely on RS485 serial interfaces rather than modern wireless mesh fabrics.