In manufacturing plants, unscheduled downtime has always been the top reason for lost productivity. Critical asset failures largely contribute to these unplanned shutdowns. Finding effective ways to predict and prevent asset failures on the factory floor has always been a hard-to-win battle. Today, the evolving framework of IoT enables us to better manage physical assets using smart sensing, scaled connectivity, and data-driven predictability. Using the IIoT framework, manufacturing plants can deploy instrumentation across the factory processes to establish a digital continuum, which connects information and utilizes actionable data. Real-time analysis of this data enables early fault detection and data-driven decision making, which in turn helps minimize unplanned downtime and improve performance, and therefore increase profits.

In manufacturing, legacy technologies, inadequate cybersecurity skills among OT operators to conduct timely patches, upgrades, segmentation, perimeter-based defense, and so on pose a serious cyber risk. The interplay of multiple vendors owning the various components of an IIoT solution and the vulnerabilities in third-party systems, such as unsecured APIs, lack of permission-based access, the use of clear text, and so on, need to be carefully examined: