While there are numerous benefits to bringing IT and OT together, achieving success requires thoughtfully addressing a number of challenges.
Running virtual machines (VMs) in OT environments alongside containers in IT environments allows companies to combine the isolation and stability of VMs with the agility of containerized applications. However, both have different requirements that must be balanced. OT environments, for instance, focus on supporting legacy applications that often aren’t updated or patched unless it’s a necessity, while in IT environments, admins prioritize frequent updates.
“To the OT world, that’s disruptive,” said Ken Espiau, principal solutions architect at Penguin Solutions, during a recent ITOps Times webinar. “But in the IT world, with our containerized technologies, we’re able to make those changes while minimizing disruption.”
According to Rudy de Anda, head of strategic alliances at Penguin Solutions, it boils down to what the biggest risk is for each side. For IT, the primary concern is data loss or theft. For OT, the greater risk is downtime that can halt production, delay delivery, or even create physical safety hazards.
As a result, one of the biggest challenges in converging IT and OT is determining ownership of the software lifecycle, including patching, updates, and ongoing maintenance.
“We have lots of different departments and groups and stakeholders that are sharing this environment and they have to come together and collaborate to make things work. Where do we draw the lines? And I think that’s as much a technology problem as it is an organizational challenge as we begin to bring groups together,” said de Anda.
There are also dependencies to consider, both from a workflow perspective and from a technology and hardware perspective. In terms of workflows, sometimes one department needs to set something up before another department can begin their work, such as quality control happening before the product can be shipped. From a hardware perspective, it’s about performance requirements and resource allocation to ensure that these OT applications don’t have latency or performance degradation issues.
Figuring out security is also a challenge. When you start putting critical applications out at the edge, figuring out how to keep them secure is crucial. “When everything was centralized, it was easier to control and manage and protect, but the business requirements have really been pushed out to the edge … so cybersecurity becomes critical, because the second an intruder is in, you really need to stop them. Every second that they’re in your network, the more damage that they can do. So, you want to have that ability to lock them out at the edge of the network because if they’re gotten to the center, it’s over,” said Espiau. He said that new edge devices that are being created and deployed must have stronger security capabilities integrated into them.
And finally, it can be a challenge to bring together IIoT and control integration. IT teams need to be able to use OT’s control systems to obtain data to make decisions. On the flip side, IT might want to make changes to control systems.
“You can leverage a lot of the data and a lot of the IIoT techniques in order to create good insights, but those really aren’t worth anything until you implement them into your control schemes and you make decisions based on those insights,” de Anda said.
He concluded that organizations must proactively address these challenges through open discussion and clear decision-making as they begin converging IT and OT. “It’s not as simple as taking IT applications and running them in an OT environment or taking OT applications and running them in an IT environment,” he said.
Penguin Solutions’ Stratus fault-tolerant computing platforms enable organizations to tackle all of these challenges from a technology perspective and provide tools to help these different departments work together more smoothly.
According to the company, Stratus platforms enable virtualization by allowing organizations to create virtual machines in which containerized applications can run. An integrated orchestration layer allows these containers to operate within a VM while giving administrators centralized visibility and control over the entire compute node.
Acknowledging the concern of consolidating workloads into a single system, Penguin Solutions designed Stratus platforms to be extremely reliable. “That is where we pride ourselves, providing fault-tolerant solutions, such as the Stratus ztC Endurance platform, which provides seven nines of availability,” de Anda said.
