Part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce which sits in a low-key building in the quiet town of Rockville, Maryland. The work that has been going on there since the NCCoE opened its doors in 2012 will have a major impact on businesses and organizations throughout the United States – and likely around the world.

How do manufacturers reduce costs and cycle times while increasing productivity, yields and market share? Through digitization. Digitization means greater connectivity and data. As more and more devices are connected to networks, silos are removed and data from each device can be transformed into a treasure chest of valuable information.

Over the past 20 years, Ethernet has increasingly infiltrated the factory floor as the primary means of connecting automation systems and transmitting field data to the network. Now the industrial arena is experiencing yet another revolution with Industry 4.0 and IIoT by which real-time data from connected sensors and actuators are being monitored, shared and analyzed. This enables advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital twin technology that prevent downtime via predictive maintenance and optimize productivity via automated forecasting and inventory management.

Our industrial customers—many of them producers and manufacturers—tend to deal with workflows that are highly concrete and tangible. Whether they are manufacturing tires, brewing beer, building automobiles, blending salad dressings, processing chemicals, formulating pharmaceuticals, refining crude oil or cleaning wastewater, the inputs of raw materials and the outputs of finished goods are fairly visible. Theoretically, you could hold them in your hands—although, clearly, you’d rather hold some in your hands more than others.

By now, most industrial network operators have heard about Time-Sensitive Networking, or TSN. We get a lot of questions from customers about its status and how it can benefit their operation. As someone who works as an editor for several TSN standards within the IEEE—the standards organization defining Ethernet—I’d like to provide a quick summary of what this technology is, where it stands and what you can consider doing right now to benefit from it.