Building India's industry 4.0: Getting IT foundation right

It’s undeniable that the Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to overhaul not only business, but also every aspect of modern life. From fridges to fitness products in the domestic world, and everything from dialysis machines to dams in the enterprise realm, we can expect things that were never connected to soon come online.

IoT will also make it possible to connect all parts of the production process in the industrial environment: machines, products, systems, and people. This connectedness is the basis for ‘Industry 4.0’ or the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. It’s been described as the next phase in the digitisation of the manufacturing sector, and holds great promise in changing the competitiveness of companies and regions.

In India, the excitement around Industry 4.0 is palpable. As the government makes strides towards global investment and plans to reform the manufacturing industry in the country through its Make in India initiative, manufacturers have a unique opportunity to emerge from the shadow of the country’s services sector and play a pivotal role in the development of a globalised manufacturing environment. Frost & Sullivan has called the adoption of Industry 4.0 “an inevitable necessity for the Indian economy” in elevating its manufacturing industry to “global levels of excellence."

However, the practical application of so called ‘Smart factories’ in India will depend on the investment of the Indian government in key areas like IoT, skills development, and the fostering of a robust data security environment. It will also hinge on the strength of the current IT environment in the manufacturing industry to embrace digital in the modern era.

Re-evaluate legacy network architecture
Though often overlooked, network is an absolutely essential link in an organisation’s ability to successfully implement digital technologies. The implementation of smart factories will fuel the already exploding number of objects now connecting to the network, creating billions of new end points, and transmitting information and interacting with applications. All of this will create an incredible strain on the network — a strain that traditional networking technologies were not designed to handle. In fact, traditional network architectures are proving to be a bottleneck in the digital era.

One emerging technology that promises to address this complexity and bring traditional networking out of its time warp is the Software-Defined-WAN, or SD-WAN. This is a revolutionary approach, offering unrivaled levels of agility to keep up with evolving business needs; simplified, centralised management to slash costs and operational complexity; and optimisation to deliver superior-performing apps and experiences to users.

Get branch IT right
Branch offices and manufacturing sites are where the business of manufacturing gets done. The ability to deploy new apps and services on-the-fly — as well as get new sites up and running quickly — are essential to ensuring the level of agility and performance digital transformation demands.

Data loss is a greater threat when it’s stored outside the secure data center. And, when something does go wrong, it’s difficult to recover data and restore business operations. Traditional approaches to managing IT at these revenue-generating sites often treat them as an afterthought.

Hyper-converged infrastructure technologies, designed specifically for the branch, put those sites back at the forefront. Manufacturing firms have been leveraging similar technologies to consolidate IT (servers, storage, backup, etc.) in the data centre for years. When applied to the branch, hyper-converged infrastructure virtualises and consolidates 100% data and servers from remote sites into data centres, centralising data security and IT management without losing the benefits of running branch services locally.

What’s more, it enables instant provisioning and recovery, providing complete security and visibility and ensuring that applications simply work. The results: dramatic improvements to data security, business continuity, agility, and operational efficiency — a solid foundation for transformation.

Get an end-to-endview of performance
In the era of Industry 4.0, complexity threatens to reign. With apps, devices, and data anywhere and everywhere — in many cases with long distances between them — there are bound to be an increasing number of blind spots in the application delivery chain.
Now more than ever before, the performance of applications and the networks that deliver them are vital to technology adoption and value realisation. And the key to delivering great app performance is understanding what is happening. This requires visibility into everything that impacts app performance — code, network, user experience — in order to detect and fix issues instantly. Visibility will help ensure it all runs as expected — that manufacturers can be agile and operate efficiently – and ultimately succeed in a very competitive and changing marketplace.

As manufacturers begin to embrace Industry 4.0 principles — establishing a foundation for agility is paramount. Attempting to apply the latest and greatest technologies without that foundation is alluring, but much like building a house on shifting sand.

(The author is Vice President for India and SAARC, Riverbed Technology)