Around two years ago we started to recognise that trends from the
world of ‘mainstream IT’ were starting to have a significant impact on manufacturing
IT; we surmised that this was because the industrial world was becoming ever
more reliant on products that were designed primarily for mainstream IT
applications. These trends included server virtualisation, thin client
architectures and cyber security considerations. It was also maybe not
surprising that the IT department was also starting to take a greater interest
in the manufacturing IT infrastructure and with them came their terminology:
the term ‘availability’ had arrived into industrial IT.
Since that time we have been amazed at the sheer rate of
adoption by our customers in considering the availability of their industrial
IT infrastructures and how this is impacting on overall system design. Virtualisation is now mainstream, thin client computing is the preferred
architecture and security has gone from something we talk about to something
that we act upon.
But we do believe that industrial IT is different to mainstream
IT and there are special design considerations that need to be taken into
account when specifying or updating. It’s this belief, and the feedback from
the market, that has led to the launch of our new Availability website www.industrialit.co.uk
The website
addresses these many inter related factors including the legacy nature of
many industrial applications and how they can be vulnerable from a security perspective,
as does the fact that many systems are validated making it impractical to keep
them updated with updates and patches.
The debate is sure to continue!
Mike Lees, Business Manager, HardwarePT
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