Meeting Expectations – 5 pillars for IoT project success

Super. Thank you, Martin. I do appreciate that.

And yes, I would far rather be in onto last time right now, but didn't get permission to travel. My name is Graham Williamson. I'm an Analyst with KAA Cole Analyst and I have for many years worked in the operational technology space. I started back in the 1980s with digital equipment corporation. I don't know any, if you remember deck, but I was the product manager for a industrial computer called the CMR 21, which was a device that you could put boards into it for analog inputs and outputs and for digital inputs and outputs. And it was fully programmable.

One of the early projects I was involved in was in Subbury in Ontario, in Canada, where the unit was being used for monitoring pollution. The Foundry had a problem in around the smokestacks. Nothing grew. There was no vegetation.

In fact, I'm told that in the seventies, NASA brought the Lander to Subbury because it was the most moon like area they could find to test the LUN Lander. I'm not sure the veracity of that statement. I do know there is a meteorite site at, at Subbury that might have been interested in that.

However, what we did is we put pollution control sensors, 200 meters, 500 meters out from the Foundry, the CMR controlled the scrubbers on the smokestacks were basically filters. And within two years there was vegetation growing around that Foundry in, in Subbury. So goes back ways a lot has happened in the meantime. But one of the things I thought we should talk about is what if you are doing an operational technology project, what are the success pillars? If you like to say, we need to get this right?

And then I just want to end up with a quick call to action, because I don't want you just sitting there and, and, and just absorbing this. I want you to go back to your, your companies and think through what you might do in the operational technology space. I was asked to come up with one word to describe the operational technology sector at this point in time. And the word I chose was exciting with the vast drop in prices that we've seen over the last 10 to 15 years and the increasing functionality we've seen in devices, things that you couldn't do just a few years ago now become viable.

So it's worthwhile revisiting what that is. And regardless of what sector you are in, okay, a lot happening in the automotive sector, particularly in Munich, you know more about it than I did the vehicle to anything type of communication that we're happening happening. The intelligent transport systems are gonna change our lives.

I'm wondering, you know, as you go out of a 5g area, what happens, maybe your car is gonna tell you that you're now leaving this 5g area because of the functionality you are going to be losing industrial manufacturing, the industry four point Z 4.0 so much happening in that space. Building information management, read an interesting article last week, about beyond eyes, a Dutch company, that's put two hun, 2000, 20,000 sensors around a building so that they can provide their clients with and charge them for either services that might be provided in that building. I like it.

When you go into a, a, a tall building these days and you, you, you tell us you want to go to the 14th floor and it tells you when, which of the elevators is the next one going to the 14th floor. I mean, I'm looking forward to the time you get into the elevator and tell it the company you go to, why should you know what floor it's on so much happening in the building information space utilities here, where I live on the gold coast in Australia, we've automated most of the water, water meters.

I get a, and it's happened twice. Now, an email from a council telling me that my water usage has gone up on characteristically. And in both cases, I've been able to find the leak and fix it. I didn't know about it until they told me retail so much happening in that space. If you're in retail, your customers are gonna want to know where did this product come from? If it's food, what farm did it come from? If it's clothing, did it come from a sustainable company? That's not using child labor, healthcare, hospitals don't want you in hospital anymore.

They can do 90% of what they do with you at home with some home monitoring device agriculture. If I was a farmer today, you've gotta go to go to school to learn about how to do now. Crop management and livestock monitoring, smart cities are parking lots now have, have parking sensors in it.

So the, the, the council knows when the utilization of parking spaces and, and obviously can charge you more for it. Park maintenance.

If, if the council here wants to send a refuse truck down through the beach parking lot, that costs a lot of money. So they put sensors on lots of the bins to tell 'em when a bin needs emptying smart homes.

I mean, it's not really, it's not really indu industrial, but I do believe that smart homes is one area where we're all going to see some major differences over the next decade, particularly in the, in the energy usage. So if we've got solar panels on the roof, we've got a car that needs charging. We need something to manage that I personally think we're going to be new homes are gonna be all DC. We don't need AC alternating current anymore for homes. Alternating. Current is great.

If you need to transmit it long, long distances, but when we've got our fuel cell in our basement, we are gonna need the mechanism to control that. And our wifi connection to the internet is going to be an edge device. That's going to allow us to do all of this computing in the home, and then also access the internet for Netflix so exciting times. But as we look at operational technology projects, what are the things we need to consider? I see too many projects going ahead, doing one thing. People say, well, why don't we just do this? And we get something and we do it.

It looks nice and shiny and, and, and, and interesting. But if we, if we don't consider a total approach to this project, I think we are missing. We are missing the boat. So the first pillar is devices there's so much has happened now in how these devices are. So can do so much for us. So we've got, we've got the temperature, humidity, pressure, proximity, gas sensors, and in the terms of actuators, that's the other thing you can do with the device.

A device can either sense something or do something as you've got an actuator, you've got binary on off, you've got hydraulic Matic, electrical, thermal magnetic, lots of capability there. If you just wanna turn a valve a little bit, you've got step motor controls. The sky's the limit in terms of, of what you can do. But as you put these devices in, what must you do?

Well, the biggie from a cybersecurity point of view is the maintenance. How do you handle the update of those devices? Because it's that the update point that you're really vulnerable.

So they, the devices must be managed. And some reg reg regulatory environments, you can't, you can't change any firmware. You it's just a hardware only device. And when you finish with it, you change it out.

If you, if you're doing firmware updates, make sure you have a process and visibility over what's happening in that space. The basic direction of devices is for integration. When I started in this industry, you bought an individual device to do this. You did some, had a controller, and then you had a communications device. We're seeing that now being integrated into a single device that you just buy off the shelf, plug it in, and where you go. We need to make sure that we can, we can control them. The second pillar is indeed that control function.

In the past, we had the programmable logic controllers that typically sets out at a remote location, doing something. We then had signals coming into a control device, which was basically a PC that could allow us to accumulate data, make some changes. And then if we had a process control installation, we might have had a DRA data acquisition system, which was graphic computer that, that showed us the, a picture of my, of the, whatever the process was.

And you could actually see the levels of things on the picture, and you could go change settings on the picture, and that's all now a converged into a, basically our PCs today can do so much that we don't need to go buy special graphics hardware anymore. We can, we can do that altogether. It also means that we've got high level programming languages that we are working with. We no longer need to go and get a specialist that understood the, how to program that program of logic controller, who he'd gone to the training, or she'd gone to the training for that device and, and was able to do it.

Don't don't need that anymore. We've got, we've got high level PCs that we're dealing with. That means that we have a distributed computer management situation. I'm gonna come back to that in pillar four, pillar three is communications. If there's any area that is changing dramatically, it's in the communication space. We need to decide though, what is it we want? Is it a local environment? Have we got a, a software to find wide area network? Is that what we are using? Cuz a lot of factories are these days in the wide area space. Is it a low power requirement we have? Okay.

So we're gonna use an LP one or a Sigfox type of device or are we in a 5g or 4g 5g space? The direction is 5g. The offerings in the 5g space now are so dramatic that we, we need to take advantage of those vendors will the carriers will provide us plans. Now that I heard an interesting story about a, a retail it's a retail company in England, they've got 10 stores they've been in business 10 years. Last year was the first year their communications costs have gone down for the last 10 years.

It's been going up, but cause of 5g now, because you now pay for the data you send rather than having to buy a SIM for a circuit. So you need to look at what that's going to benefit benefits you. Now IOT platforms are also coming along. We need to make sure that we are ready for that operational technology. People break into a cold sweat when they hear IOT platform, but that's what's happening. Cloud-based environments that are going to make our life a lot easier. And of course, edge computing is important. Pillar force information technology. There's been so many changes in that space.

You well aware in the last five years is what's happened in terms of our security operations center. Our event management systems are the, the automated response systems that we've put in place. We need to make sure we, if that's applicable to our OT environment, that we use them. If we've got them, let's use them. Access controllers has come a long way. Data loss prevention, all of these things apply in the OT space. So the direction is to look at how we leverage advance at the advances that we've had in the it space in our OT environment. Okay.

Particularly if we are running some say we have a strategy for zero, zero trust. We need to see how that applies within our OT side.

If we, if we're using Mitra attack again, we need to, to look at those and see how that will apply. One technology that might be useful if we need to need to protect our OT environment. And we typically do is a unit duration gateway will allow us to communicate our, for instance, identity provider detail from our information technology side to the OT side so that the user on the OT side has similar credentials as they have on the it side. And indeed the last pillar is security. So there's two things we need to concern about. One is the infrastructure and protecting that.

And the other is the data. Typically in an OT environment, data is not well protected. Many installations produce a lot of data and making sure you aggregate that, making sure you anonymize it for any personal identifiable information is, is important. And then put it into a protected database that we can now access. And as I say, in terms of the direction, let's look at the frameworks we're using in the information and technology side to see what that means in our, in our OT side. So I've got a list of little graphic here showing our pillars that are holding up our operational technology.

The astute ones in the audience will notice that the cybersecurity has fallen on its side best because it's foundational are cybersecurity has got, got, got a hold up all of the pillars of our operational technology. Okay. Last slide. I did mention that I wanted to have a call to action. Okay. I would like to recommend that you go back to your businesses, you go through some sort of idea generation step. Now that means you've gotta get the right people in the room and you gotta stand in front of the white board and then say, what is it we could be doing?

And ideas are gonna come fast and furious. You need to pick the good ones and then look at how that is going to what prioritize them. Then you need to go through stakeholder analysis, too many projects. I see OT projects going ahead in secret people say, oh, let's just try this and get this working and see what happens. Okay. A kiss of death communicate widely. You can possibly use the budget that your compat has provided. You can get him or her excited about it. Then plan the project.

If there's any area where getting the right resources is important, it is in the operational technology space. The good people never, never available because they're too busy. So you need to plan it properly, get a schedule in place and make sure you schedule those people to help you with what needs to be done. And finally then deploy, deploy the solution, execute the plan, measure your successes and communicate them to the other people in your, in your organ organization. Okay. That's been a very fast, quick run through in an operational technology ideas. I hope it's been useful to you.

And if there's one or two questions, I would love to answer that. If there's some comments too, please, please make sure you, you get back to us with your comments. Add to.