Future-Proofing Resilience: How Manufacturers Are Navigating Growing Pains of IT/OT Convergence

The manufacturing industry is at a crossroads. With automation and emerging technologies like AI, organizations are eager to make operational and production processes more efficient. However, for many manufacturers, the rapid pace of digitizing legacy infrastructure and systems has also exposed many unanticipated hurdles, with one of the biggest being the convergence between IT and operational technology (OT).

Manufacturers know innovation is essential if they want a shot at capturing new consumer trends while maintaining costs and investments — and IT/OT convergence has the potential to boost modernization, production, and time to market. But bringing these two separate technology stacks and different cultures on IT and OT teams together comes with challenges.

IT/OT Convergence Ignites Culture Change

For the past decade, manufacturers have been quick to onboard digital point solutions to gain more visibility across various infrastructures, improve operational margins, and enhance customer experiences. Ultimately, the marriage of IT and OT makes a lot of sense — integrating OT systems into digital infrastructure surfaces broad insights at the edge and increases visibility and awareness of disruptions, threats, and other incidents across the entirety of the operation. But while the benefits of converging these two systems might be obvious, the practical realities present another story.

Historically, both disciplines worked in distinct compartments, with separate processes, tools, and expertise. OT systems sit primarily at the plant or factory level and include hardware and software that detect change through direct monitoring of industrial assets and equipment. IT systems, on the other hand, are used for data-centric computing and can reside at the enterprise and plant or factory level.

One of the most common issues with IT/OT convergence is that legacy systems are difficult to customize and support, with much longer lifecycles than IT. Legacy systems often have far less rigorous security safeguards. But tightly coupling IT with the OT environment also creates new threat vectors. Altogether, while OT systems may seem secure now, integration of these legacy systems into the IT network will open the door for ransomware and unseen vulnerabilities, allowing hackers to take control of manufacturing processes to interfere with production or even tamper with products. And when security incidents do occur, companies struggle with the ability to adequately address them in light of skills gaps and ongoing talent shortages.

Aside from technology integration challenges, joining IT and OT teams — both accustomed to independence — results in significant culture change on both sides. They’ve rarely worked together, yet they are now expected to prioritize, collaborate, and communicate to achieve joint goals while also reducing duplicate operating costs and complexity. The marriage was a significant mindshift.

As the industry continues its rapid pace of adopting digital solutions, manufacturers will need to be smarter about how they integrate and transform legacy systems, knowing that, at least initially, their exposure to potential attacks will increase.

Future-Proofing the Journey

The IT/OT convergence might be an uphill climb, but it also gives manufacturers an opening to shift from reactive to proactive systems. Tools like advanced monitoring, predictive analytics, and automation of standard workflows can increase availability and system performance. For Honda Manufacturing of Alabama, Splunk’s predictive capabilities helped transform their approach to problem-solving and innovation, resulting in a 70% faster mean time to repair, as well as increased profitability and efficiency.

Implementing a comprehensive platform like Splunk can provide the critical vehicle for integration across IT/OT systems. Among other things, a centralized platform has the ability to support the vertical integration of data that has been historically hard to access across siloed IT and OT systems.

To better address security issues in unprotected attack vectors, manufacturers will need to gain edge-to-enterprise visibility. Improving security posture represents another huge opportunity for manufacturers around integration across their IT and OT systems. By giving teams edge-to-enterprise visibility across IT/OT systems, Splunk can bridge the traditional silos and improve collaboration across teams to more quickly identify incidents and accelerate response times.

Manufacturers’ digital transformation journey is well underway. Hurdles like cloud integration, comprehensive data ingestion, and network connectivity issues continue to impact optimization and efficiency across both systems. However, the process also provides opportunities to learn and course correct. And the solutions that manufacturers invest in now will only set them up for success in a new and competitive future.

To learn more about how you can improve your security posture across IT and OT, monitor and troubleshoot IT and OT systems, and increase equipment and asset uptime, visit us at our Manufacturing industry solutions page.

Read more about how your Manufacturing industry peers are using Splunk to keep systems secure, prevent production lines from disruption and boost profits in our Manufacturing customer e-book, Building Resilience.