This is a postscript to the news-post yesterday (August 14) about a mad rush of Industry 4.0 data over the next five years, which ABI Research forecasts will multiply in industrial venues from some unknown (or un-shared, in the press note) start-point today, where it is mostly locked in silos anyway, to 4.4 zettabytes by 2030. As well as a considerable business opportunity, there are implications from this for technology vendors to make sure their solutions do what they have to.
Which was the message missed off the end of yesterday’s post; that the sales opportunity is “immense”, but that the sales-side must develop “scalable solutions” that mix high-security, advanced analytics (probably AI), and easy interoperability. So says Leo Gergs, principal analyst at ABI Research, and author of the report that makes the forecast – and also makes the comparison that industrial OT data volumes will almost-match total global mobile data volumes in the period.
This is the warning, then – as intimated yesterday. To expand, Gergs outlines three “distinctive capabilities across three main domains” for technology sellers to develop and present, and for technology buyers to seek and deploy. They effectively outline how to think about infrastructure, systems, and strategy, covering respectively network and compute infrastructure, integrated data management solutions, and partnerships and policy to keep it all tuned and secure.
They go like this; all the quotes below are from Gergs…
1 | Networks and storage (infrastructure)
“Enterprises will need to invest heavily in data storage solutions to handle the large volumes of OT and upgraded network infrastructure will be necessary to support the high bandwidth required for transmitting massive amounts of data.”
2 | Integration and interoperability (systems)
“There will be a greater demand for sophisticated data management systems to organize, store, and retrieve OT data. At present, only five percent of OT data is properly utilized due to high friction between data silos. To maximize the benefit of OT data for advanced use cases, like generative AI and others, enterprises will [require] integration solutions that help tear down the walls of individual data silos. High-performance and edge computing solutions will be essential to process and analyze the data in real-time.”
3 | Security and support (strategy)
“The large volume of OT data, often generated by critical infrastructure, presents a tempting target for cyberattacks, necessitating robust cybersecurity measures. The massive IT outage following a malfunction [in] CrowdStrike software update laid bare in a shocking way the importance of a thorough security strategy and a robust data storage and accessibility strategy. Enterprises are overwhelmed by the complexity this entails. Therefore, they will turn to digitization partners to provide these strategies as part of a comprehensive data-and-cloud offering.”
