Digital Transformation Viewpoints

Recently, several global oil and chemical leaders created a groundswell of support around the need for sustainable and open digital twins. Sustainable digital twins are needed after handover for the long operate and maintain portion of a plant’s lifecycle. Open digital twins are needed to accommodate the variety of applications and business processes to operate and maintain. The implications for this new initiative are far-reaching into the operating and business systems of energy and chemicals producers and their technology suppliers.

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Drones and robots in process applications? Drones are just than flying robots, and robotic applications today go far beyond logistics and assembly. These mobile devices are used for inspection and gathering of data points in previously inaccessible places. Equally important is the back-office framework that manages and tracks robots and drones as they move about, enforcing safety norms, obtaining take-off clearances, and ensuring mission success.

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Join ARC’s David Humphrey and Dillon Fosa for a quick talk about the hottest topics at ARC’s upcoming European Industry Forum. As forum manager, David has spent the past 4 months recruiting top speakers to cover both the conventional topics such as Open Process Automation and Industrial Cybersecurity, as well as leading-edge technologies not yet covered at our forum, such as DataOps for Industrial Users and Robots and Drones in Industry. Our 2-day forum includes a wide variety of user testimonials, expert panels and workshops. So join us next week by registering here today: https://arc-industry-forum-europe.arcweb.com/.

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Schneider Electric’s Michael Martinez (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikejmartinez/), EcoStruxure Foxboro DCS Leader, discusses sustainability and automation with ARC Research Director Harry Forbes (https://www.linkedin.com/in/harry-forbes-9bb4ba/).  Schneider Electric helps organizations achieve responsible profitability while also monitoring their sustainability targets.  Michael shares examples how Schneider Electric enables safe and effective use of your energy and resources for positive impact on your organization, your customers, and your community.

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In Singapore, Boris Marrone, Vice President and Head of South Asia and South East Asia, AVEVA, which describes itself as a global leader in industrial software, driving digital transformation and sustainability, tells ARC’s Bob Gill that the reason why sustainability is now a priority for AVEVA is because it is a critical performance benchmark for customers reassessing business strategies and carbon footprints in the light of COP26.

Other aspects discussed in this podcast include the value 2021’s $5 billion acquisition of OSIsoft is bringing to AVEVA; how Performance Intelligence is delivering deeper, data-driven insights to customers; the successful digital projects completed for Petronas in Malaysia and SCG Chemicals in Thailand, and the opportunities Boris Marrone is eyeing for business growth in the region in 2022.

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Welcome back to another cybersecurity-focused episode of the ARC Digital Transformation Podcast. In this episode, we speak to Randy Armstrong, director of IT operations at the OPC Foundation.  OPC has a very solid cybersecurity foundation and Randy has been at the center of this for some time, giving us an excellent summary of the many different layers of cybersecurity within OPC UA. 

Security isn't something that was bolted on to OPC. From the beginning, security has been a primary concern. According to Randy,

"We wanted to have a standard that incorporated security as a first-class concept. From the beginning, every aspect of the specification is analyzed in terms of its impact on security, and, and has to be able to follow the conventions and the requirements that we've laid out for the overall framework. So by doing this, we've developed a standard that has a very cohesive, holistic view of security that shows up at different levels in the implementations."

Many of the concepts behind what's known today as "zero trust" already exist in OPC, such as advanced authentication schemes, including the use of PKI, application authentication, and more. According to Randy,

"What we built into the OPC UA infrastructure is this concept of application authentication. So every application that's installed on a particular node has a unique identifier and has a certificate assigned to it. And it will be configured to only allow communication with a finite number of other applications. And it's up to the administrators to decide who's allowed to trust who, and you have very fine-grained control. So you can have a cell on a factory floor with 10 machines, and those 10 machines would all be I'll be configured to talk to each other but nobody else. And this is going to be independent of the user credentials, which may determine what access somebody has when they're accessing the machine. So it's really two layers of authentication."

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In the latest cybersecurity podcast, Sid Snitkin, leader of the cybersecurity practice at ARC, interviews Radiflow Chief Information Security Officer Rani Kehat and ServiceNow head of product James Destro.  This was a wide-ranging discussion covering the convergence of IT and OT cybersecurity, the skills gap, incident response, and more. It's also a good introduction to Radiflow and ServiceNow. 

Radiflow was one of the pioneers to develop OT-specific security solutions, and today they have greatly expanded their role to be a proactive cybersecurity provider focused on managing risk and getting the right threat intelligence to measure cybersecurity posture.  You can also hear about ServiceNow's expanding role in OT cybersecurity and its partnership with Radiflow. According to James Destro, "ServiceNow has now extended into workflows for the operational technology space, specifically around Incident management, vulnerability response, security, incident response, just to name a few. "

Rani Kehat's thoughts on the Convergence of IT and OT Cybersecurity are also worth noting:

“The term IT and OT I think is slowly dissolving. Basically, we're talking about processes, we're talking about production. They span across multiple silos of technology. Some of them could be in the cloud, some could be something physical, and they are all joined to the same production process. So, these boundaries are currently dissolving and not really describing correctly the threat landscape or the client's system. Today, when we look at any production environment, it will start from anywhere from the enterprise, for example, SAP, and it will go down into the production flow commands, sent via data channels. Controllers today are working on TCP IP networks, some of the production environments,  are even service-oriented. So, the convergence is here. The thing that hasn't converged are people, we haven't converged our mentality between engineers and cyber people. “

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In this podcast, Tony Catterson, Manager, Pilz New Zealand, tells ARC’s Bob Gill why he is so excited about the digitalization opportunities in the world of machine safety. And from his several decades of experience in the sector, Tony gives his take on the current level of machine safety awareness across different industries and offers three key lessons for manufacturers looking to ensure a safe workplace.

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In this podcast hosted by Bob Gill, ARC’s General Manager for Southeast Asia & Friedhelm Best, Vice President of Asia Pacific Region for HIMA discuss the link between digitalization and process safety. Friedhelm explains why, in the era of Industry 4.0, safety systems need to be just as smart as production processes. 

In this 30 minute podcast a wide variety of other aspects & insightful topics are discussed. Including the current level of process safety awareness in Asia; the increasing need for plants to be both safe and cybersecure, the continuing control and safety integration/separation debate; and how lifecycle services can best be deployed to maximize the safety profile of customer facilities.  

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ARC Advisory Group’s, Peter Reynolds discusses Workforce Competency with Honeywell’s Jennifer Prgesa, Product Line Leader and Carlos Pazos, Solutions Marketing Manager. Learn about how companies are accelerating their digital transformation journey’s through Workforce Competency tools.

Would you like to be a guest on our growing podcast?

Do you have an intriguing or thought provoking topic you'd like to discuss on our podcast? Please contact Our Producer Tom Cabot [email protected]

View all the episodes here: https://thedigitaltransformationpodcast.buzzsprout.com