More convergence, more sectors, more often: Industry 4.0 is well and truly alive across factory floors. From food processing plants adding IoT sensors to oil rigs connecting legacy PLCs to cloud analytics, interconnected devices and data flows are commonplace. The arrival of this long-awaited evolution across manufacturing, logistics, and other RFID-heavy sectors marks a fundamental shift, requiring company leaders and network admins to rethink their approach or risk being left behind.
This is no small feat as traditional network boundaries overlap and create both operational risks and security vulnerabilities. IT and OT— once standalone sides of the network— are converging and forcing leaders to modernize without breaking what works.
Getting this network balancing act right is critical because it delivers a dual benefit— unleashing new operational efficiencies while closing security gaps that hackers are eager to exploit. Let’s examine how leaders can seize the moment in Industry 4.0.
Factory Floor of the Future is Now
For more than a decade, insiders have been watching and waiting for the impending arrival of Industry 4.0. That future is here with the widespread adoption of robotization, automation, big data, IIoT, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Seemingly overnight, industrial operations boast smart asset tracking, newfound supply chain visibility, and RFID-enabled automation.
Of course, from a network monitoring and data security standpoint, this evolution raises questions about how information is collected and transmitted. Big data across operations means increased volumes of information flowing through OT networks to repositories, databases, data lakes, and data warehouses. While this unlocks predictive maintenance, cost reduction, and capacity planning, it’s a fundamentally different proposition to oversee. What were previously simple controllers have become network-sensitive data generators.
Further, as organizations strive to process data closer to the source, industrial devices are taking on new responsibilities at the edge. A PLC, an industrial gateway, or an IoT appliance is more often expected to process data on-site, either partially or fully, before sending summaries to the cloud. This shift makes it more important to monitor available resources on these device types, much like how IT manages resources on servers running critical applications. Whether it wants to or not, OT is therefore forced to think and act more like IT, and vice versa.
Network Gaps, Security Threats
Industry 4.0 is as much about changing technology as it is about changing cultures. In years past, the roles and responsibilities of IT and OT were distinctly defined, with the former focusing on data security and network performance, and the latter on operational continuity and production efficiency. Today, the lines are blurred, with each encroaching on the other’s territory and pointing fingers when something goes wrong.
For example, industrial protocols were designed for deterministic, high-speed communication in airgapped environments— security was never a priority because it didn’t need to be. But, as OT networks connect to enterprise systems, they’re suddenly exposed via protocols lacking authentication and encryption. The cultural status quo no longer gels with the technical reality and teams need to move in kind.
There’s a bottom-line pressure, too, because backdoors and blind spots between IT and OT are among the most common methods bad actors use to infect networks. Hackers know that industrial uptime is the lifeblood of operations— Fortune Global 500 companies lose approximately $1.4 trillion each year, or 11% of their annual revenue, to unplanned production pauses— and are ready to pounce. In fact, industrial ransomware attacks increased by 50% in one quarter earlier this year, threatening leaders with either a payout or a lockout.
Therefore, ensuring that IT and OT teams are aware of and work together to address network weaknesses (wherever they’re found) is vital.
What Can Leaders do to Keep Up
The need to monitor device status, performance metrics, and data security is nothing short of a paradigm shift demanding a new posture. We ran a survey in July with 1,200 network admins that revealed two-thirds of organizations still rely on reactive, alarm-based monitoring. While this represents a good foundation, the next evolution requires integrated monitoring and unified dashboards for proactive, intelligent, and predictive operations. This way, companies can deliver cross-protocol visibility across old and new endpoints, baseline monitoring with automated anomaly detection even at the edge, and a single pane of glass for interdisciplinary teams.
The fact is that teams that respect IT and OT equally are proving to be more resilient. In June, Fortinet reported that companies prioritizing OT security experience lower-impact intrusions, and that more than half (52%) of organizations now make the CISO/CSO responsible for OT. It’s good to see companies lead from the top since cultural change doesn’t happen overnight nor without executive buy-in. I’m certainly heartened to see walls breaking down and more IT professionals collaborating with production and control engineers to gain a deeper understanding of OT.
For those moving in this direction, success lies in building teams that combine IT expertise with an eye on industrial automation requirements – it’s not one or the other but both at the same time.
The factory floor isn’t reverting back to what it was. As such, leaders have no other choice but to respect the technological, cultural, and managerial demands of these multiple shifts – adaptation is the best bet to not only survive but thrive in Industry 4.0.
