Every decade has its big manufacturing trends and hyped-up IT issue(s). Remember Y2K? Nowadays there are several topics that have been the subject of numerous articles in manufacturing trade publications. 

If your job mandate includes maintaining uptime then network security is an area you can’t afford to ignore. In the industrial space the biggest risk comes from accidental network introductions, such as a virus introduced by a supplier or an employee via a USB drive. Once that happens, your manufacturing or process control operations could be in jeopardy.

Industrial Ethernet networks are becoming more sophisticated as organizations strive for high reliability and performance plus seamless data access and reporting. Flat networks are evolving into managed infrastructure and there are many new technologies, such as redundancy using PRP (Parallel Redundancy Protocol) to consider.

On the eve of April 8, Microsoft retired support for the Windows XP operating system (OS)– leaving millions of Windows XP users susceptible to accidental and deliberate security issues. Though the retirement had been long planned and with fair warning, industrial network users are just beginning to comprehend the ramifications.

Nobody likes the job of replacing a good team member when they retire. Yet, that is the job the manufacturing industry is faced with as a trusted component of the industrial application ecosystem steps down from active duty. That component is the Windows XP operating system (OS), a workhorse of a product that is pervasive in factories, energy facilities and many critical infrastructure systems around the world.