You’ve probably heard, said or read the term “Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)” several times this week alone – it’s become a widely-used buzz phrase, capturing the attention of the media and businesses across all industrial markets due to the transformative impact it’s starting to have on the global economy. The ability to use the manufacturing data enabled by the IIoT is what puts the “smart” in smart factory. Researchers say the move to smart factories could add $500 billion to $1.5 trillion in economic value in just five years.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is revolutionizing manufacturing and demanding greater productivity. As companies compete to get their products to market faster and cheaper, they need simple solutions to enable agility in their operations – all at the snap of a finger. Since there’s no time or budget for special tools or expensive, highly-trained engineers and electricians, machine builders need products that are easy to use, install and maintain. As you may have read in this past blog post about the Smart Factory of The Future, this need is driving a trend in industrial automation called “plug-and-produce.” 

2017 is expected to be an improved year for oil and gas. Reports show the industry is expanding, jobs are growing and drilling permits have doubled. This leads many to believe that over the next quarter, the market will rebound from several years of plummeting sales. Even with a rosy forecast, no industry is immune to challenges, and oil and gas is no exception. The oil and gas sector faces a unique array of pain points, from traditional concerns of safety and reliability, downtime and availability to dynamic new-age issues, such as regulatory and cyber security concerns. The key for overcoming these obstacles is having a sound and secure networking infrastructure.

Who’s responsible for industrial cyber security in your organization? Whether it’s Information Technology (IT) or a cross-functional ICS operations and process control group – often labeled Operations Technology (OT) – they likely have incompatible approaches to resolving cyber security risk.

As demand for mass transit increases in densely populated urban areas, so do passenger demands for more entertainment, on-time delivery and safety. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and impending technologies like Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) are making this possible. TSN is a novel technology, currently in development at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), that offers an entirely new level of determinism in standard IEEE 802.1 and IEEE 802.3 Ethernet networks. Standardizing Ethernet networks with TSN will deliver an important capability: deterministic, time-critical packet delivery.