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COMMUNICATIONS & NETWORKS
KEEPING THE NETWORK RUNNING
Alan Stewart-Brown, VP EMEA, Opengear, says manufacturing’s information value loop demands better network resilience
nterprise-level IoT has huge potential for manufacturers, delivering greater insights into the products they have sold. That could be anything from a car, to a connected fridge or any smart device. The data from these products constantly updates the manufacturer on how they are operating and how consumers use them. It opens the door to the offer of new services and support packages which provide incremental revenue streams.
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This process, known as “the information value loop”, consists of three interconnected elements: stages, value drivers, and technologies. For information to drive value, it needs to move through all of the loop’s stages, each of which is facilitated by specific technologies.
An act is monitored by a sensor that creates information which passes through a network so it can be communicated and collected in compliance with technical, legal, regulatory, or social standards. The loop is completed through augmented behaviour technologies that either enable automated action or drive human decisions that improve actions.
Making good use of the information value loop is essential to manufacturing success but it all hinges on maintaining a fully resilient network. Without that, it cannot succeed.
Resilience needs intelligence Efficiency and excellence in network infrastructures are what maximise operational efforts and remove bottlenecks, downtime, and excessive costs, while also maintaining the information value loop. In manufacturing, time equals money. When a device on the network fails, accurate and fast troubleshooting is crucial.
That’s why manufacturers urgently require a resilient network to ensure the business continuity needed for optimised operations. Manufacturing companies have many distributed plants and engineers must ensure they can manage their network remotely to
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manufacturers crave - but one weakness they don’t overcome is the last mile problem. The last mile is the final element of the WAN network that connects an organisation’s factories, data centres, and distribution outlets to its SD-WAN and cloud services. Since this is often the weakest link between an establishment and its SD-WAN and cloud applications, manufacturers need a solution that offers additional network bandwidth and availability. Ideally, they need to achieve uninterrupted Internet connectivity for branch LANs and equipment over a link that is not part of the last mile.
This is where a solution like Smart Out of Band management technology enables secure access to critical devices, both physical and virtual. The network engineering team can operate from a central location, anticipating
maximise uptime. Network resilience is the ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults that challenge normal operations. More than just improving uptime or building in redundancy, network resilience adds a layer of intelligence to the IT infrastructure.
Eliminating the weakest link The expanding use of connected devices brings manufacturers benefits and opportunities but also challenges. Cloud services and SD-WAN support the hyper- connectivity that many modern
and remediating issues without sending a technician to a site. A technique known as Failover to Cellular (F2C) will bring further benefits, including continued internet connectivity for remote LANs and equipment over high-speed 4G LTE or 3G networks when the primary link is unavailable.
Smart Out of Band management’s primary application is to provide secure, remote access to critical devices even when the primary network is down. It offers presence and proximity to the distributed network, with a console server at every location, physically connected to routers, switches and key hardware. The addition of 4G-LTE provides a secure alternative access path, and Failover to Cellular provides enough bandwidth for critical processes to continue to operate during an outage. When the network goes down, Smart Out of Band keeps the network running. Combining the Smart Out of Band approach with network operations (NetOps) processes will further drive resilience and enable manufacturers to achieve sustained benefits from the information value loop. Manufacturers can deliver zero touch provisioning, effectively provisioning the network without manual intervention.
Keeping the information value loop rolling
This combination of Smart Out of Band and NetOps automation is effective at slashing downtime in manufacturing. Manufacturers using these technologies to secure their networks, improve efficiency and productivity and minimise the risk of disruption. Providing a solid foundation for digital transformation, these technologies allow manufacturers to keep their information value loop fully operational, ensuring continuous delivery of critical information about customers and product performance that increase competitiveness and revenues.
Opengear
www.opengear.com
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