Inductive Automation's Kevin McClusky suggests a different approach to make your industrial systems safe and secure in this month's featured guest blog.

What would it take to break into Fort Knox? As one of the most secure locations on the planet, it wouldn’t be easy. However, someone with the right amount of time, planning, and determination may be able to find a way.

The same is true for most industrial systems. So, how to protect what’s inside? Strategies that may work in the physical world—thicker walls or taller fences—don’t translate to digital systems. The tools of the trade here are a variety of high-tech solutions such as firewalls, SIEMs, IDS’s, and IPS’s. These are tools mainly to monitor network traffic and control the flow, and provide early alerts if there’s unusual activity.

However, what if we threw out all of those traditional tools and took a different approach?

Hear from John Harrington, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at HighByte, as our guest series on the open automation ecosystem continues.

Many companies are looking to improve their business by collecting and making better use of industrial data. Whether you are performing AI/ML-based predictive analytics, setting up quality dashboards, measuring lean projects, or simply logging for traceability, you require consistent, reliable, and secure data. At HighByte, an industrial software company, we’re focused on providing the infrastructure to reliably manage data delivery at scale. 

How can you deliver modern Industry 4.0 capabilities that still come in under budget? Harry McCollum of Tatsoft illustrates.

Today’s applications require more than a one-vendor approach. FrameworX by Tatsoft provides an open, extensible software platform as an alternative to the big control vendors. It includes everything you need to build world-class industrial applications at an affordable price: SCADA, HMI, MES, IIoT, mobile, dashboards, and more. With FrameworX, you can do it all without breaking the bank!

Want to get started with MQTT today? Ian Skerrett of HiveMQ shows you how, as our guest series on the open automation ecosystem continues.

Many companies are turning to MQTT and Sparkplug to simplify the process of acquiring their industrial data. MQTT provides lightweight, publish/subscribe communication that allows you to decouple hardware from software. By removing these dependencies, you can also remove the data silos that have existed in many industrial deployments. Sparkplug provides a common format for industrial operators to send data that can be processed by different applications. The openness and data interoperability of Sparkplug makes it possible to start implementing many IIoT use cases.

Nathan Field of Ascend Data Tech joins our guest series to explain why and how you should put your process data into a distributed ledger

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology, increasingly ready to change the landscape of business, everything from finance to supply chain. As you set forth into the path of Industry 4.0, you should take stock of how you could integrate blockchain into your own processes. Let's talk about how to know when it could benefit your process and how Opto 22's groov series can help you succeed.

Get everyone on the same page with data tools that help you distinguish the signal from the noise. Tor Eriksen of Clarify explains how.