Inside Intelligent Enterprises

Taking a proactive approach to managing operational technology (OT) and IoT systems has significant business advantages today and provides foundations for AI led transformation in the future. 

From ensuring production line uptime, monitoring safety systems and providing data to enterprise systems, all of this data is valuable in the shift to digitalisation.  However, this is an area that industries such as manufacturing have had challenges in adoption and integration due to a diverse range of systems, technologies, and infrastructure.

Addressing these challenges the WINGS.OTNxT.AI platform is an end-to-end managed service that covers the entire spectrum of OT and IoT systems, covering devices, networks, and applications. A joint development between Wipro and Intel, both companies brought their expertise across services and software in IoT and OT, to create the platform, which has already seen significant adoption with over 40 customers already using the platform. 

Purushottam K, Global head of IOT and IT/OT convergence at Wipro said, “We believe that the environment is now conducive to IT/OT integration initiatives since we are seeing standardisation gaining ground, especially with adoption of IEC 62443 and NERC CIP standards.”

Purushottam continues “only 10% of companies have cracked the code on IT / OT integration. Most companies either struggle in managing heightened cybersecurity challenges due to broader attack surfaces or lack the system & data visibility across the 2 landscapes. WINGS.OTNxT.AI addresses this by putting several layers of technologies into play that ensures Device and Asset inventory management, plugging them into a secure network, identifying their cyber vulnerabilities and creating an entire knowledge graph that creates a digital view of all devices, assets and processes on the factory floor.”

With OT security attacks on the rise, Kannan Babu, Chief Edge AI Solutions architect at Intel said, “The WINGS.OTNxT.AI platform proactively addresses security challenges at the hardware and software layers – through full disc encryption, secure boot and Edge to Cloud network security.” The platform also enables heightened security via greater Asset visibility, identifying vulnerabilities in the network and deep analytics via data monitored in the Security Operations Centre (SOC) which helps detect anomalies in the data.

Kannan further added that to enable siloed OT systems to integrate with IT environments, Intel has introduced Time Coordinated Computing (TCN) in every CPU targeted at real time applications in the OT network and enabled distributed computing so that compute on the OT Edge cluster is connected to the Cloud data in the IT environment. 

This ability to provide a highly secure knowledge graph combined with TCN and a tighter integration between OT and IT data makes WINGS.OTNxT.AI a game changer. WINGS.OTNxT.AI also effectively embeds self-healing capabilities and semantic analytics for machines to understand context better, which enables Enterprises to move from Automation to Autonomy in operations. The shift to full autonomy is truly underway. 

For those with an end goal of creating a digital twin of the operating system, platforms such as WINGS.OTNxT.AI enables such transitions and sets up the company for a more secure, integrated and confident future.