The Real Industrial Challenge

I was talking with a group of companies last week about security when I realized that these large industrial companies were actually less secure than a typical consumer.

Really.

Imagine that you had your house full of smart devices, completely unsecured – now open your door, turn off your lights and go upstairs and go to bed.

Good luck sleeping.

This is the challenge for these large companies – they are mostly in the dark when it comes to the plethora of new devices that proliferate their facilities.  These customers are not focused on better encryption, high-speed pipes or more processing speed.  Instead, they need to find solutions to visibility, device health and other fundamental challenges that IT professionals seemingly cannot grasp.  These customers want more uptime, to get ahead of maintenance curves and increases in job safety.

All things that IT vendors apparently struggle to grasp because these real concerns are Operational Technology (OT) and not IT.

That said, there is no realistic way to increase security unless true, cross-vendor, visibility exists.  There is no meaningful way to increase connectivity unless there exists centralized management that shows an entire system in one understandable location.  Uptime and safety go hand-in-hand with more modern equipment but only if the new suite of equipment can be properly controlled without a ton of extra effort – exactly the opposite of what happens now.  The current, highly-fractured, world of industrial IoT (IIoT) is the antithesis of good operational best practices.  Instead of standards, there exists isolation.  Instead of cohesive systems, there exists disjointed, one-off, efforts that create operational silos and decreased performance.

At Bear, we feel that providing a true cross-vendor solution is essential for the IIoT to succeed.  We think that provides consolidated management that focuses on devices, systems, and OT is critical to long-term success.

That said, we are new and might not have the answer we think we possess.

What do you think?  Are we on the right track or do you think we are missing the boat?