The Changing Roles of Operational Technology and Information Technology

Introduction

 

Operational Technology (OT), to put it simply, refer to systems that interact with the physical environment, or at least, manage devices that interact with the physical environment. Examples of these systems include the monitoring or control of building management suites, emergency alert systems within a facility, physical access systems, etc. OT systems control highly sensitive and critical operational functions within a facility.

This is to be contrasted with Informational Technology (IT) systems which control more supportive functions in a facility. These systems manage comparatively less sensitive and critical functions, though they still generate valuable data for the organisation. The data collected here may be used to teach an AI Predictive Maintenance engine.

Take the example of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. It is one of several control system architectures historically built using OT-based technologies and sensors. SCADA is a control system architecture comprising computers, networked data communications and graphical user interfaces for high-level supervision of machines and processes) was and still is the heart of the operational center. It is a key technology for facilities such as refineries, oil and gas platforms, and so on.

For several years these SCADA systems were built on Intel processors with MS Windows as the Operating System, but with proprietary (vendor specific) application software and interface hardware/software. The standard practice had generally been that one supplier delivered an end-to-end SCADA solution to an entire facility, whereas the “mixing and matching” of different suppliers (that is, deploying a combination of OT systems from different suppliers to create a more cost-effective SCADA solution) was not allowed as it could undermine end-to-end integrity and safety of the facility.

OT (Operational Technology) takes care of all sensor information created in a plant, initiates appropriate action and warns (alarms) Operations in case their action is needed. Any SCADA set up is 100% isolated using firewalls, etc. from the rest of the IT set up, making sure that bad actors are unable to access heart of the facilities thereby causing material damage.

There are movements to make SCADA more Open Standards based: Look at the example here for the OPAF developments and over time this means that it will become possible to mix and match equipment from different suppliers within the same SCADA set up.

Since there was no other option then to connect all sensors to the OT network and for that reason any type of sensors was connected whether business critical or not. Of course, the number of sensors is increasing very fast and at the same time the purpose of these sensors is changing from just reactive to a mixture of reactive and predictive behaviour. In the case of the latter these sensors will be IT connected since predictive sensors do not need to be time critical and any loss of a signal will not immediately cause major issues. Therefore, the overall trend that sensors installed for predictive purposes are IT connected and that has as additional benefits:

 

• IT is an far more standard based set up and for that reason costs per sensor are an fraction (24% or less) of costs of sensors with the same functionality, but part of OT.
• Choice of sensors is much broader than in OT; In the case of IT the LoRaWAN ( https://lora-alliance.org/ ) based network standard has an ECO system of over 500 companies and therefore many companies bringing cost competitive sensors to the market.
• In the case of IT it also means that this becomes part of the IOT set up of a company.

 

Examples of OT and IT sensors:

 

• OT: Temperature sensor with immediate operational impact when beyond ideal range.
• IT: Pressure sensor to be used to predict, as data input for AI Machine Learning, future eqp problems.
• IT: Drones collecting images of damage on a platform, but this damage does not risk the operational integrity.
• OT: Camera spotting critical leakages and we cannot afford these images.