By Pat Dixon, PE, PMP
President of DPAS, (DPAS-INC.com)
In the United States there are about 35 thousand motor vehicle deaths per year. The odds of dying in an auto accident are about 700 times higher than in air travel. Wow, it sure is dangerous, isn't it? Why would you ever want to be on a highway?
I don't notice any lack of demand on roads anywhere I have been. Houston has one of the highest per capita lane miles in the US yet I hit gridlock nearly every time I go there. The reason is despite the risk, the public infrastructure of highways we have is the best way to go in many cases. You don't have the resources to build your own private I-10. Even if you allowed others to use it, you can't afford to employ people to keep drunk drivers off of it. You can be careful and get a car with appropriate safety provisions. You can drive defensively and use technology to avoid potential dangers. None of this will give you completely safe, no risk transportation but clearly the system works and if the dangers frighten you then you will be paralyzed by paranoia.
In like manner, the Internet is a dangerous place. There are hackers and viruses and lots of other garbage. However, like the highways they are publicly available, making it affordable. With proper consideration, design, and investment you can connect with low risk.
In the Industry 3.0 era it was possible to connect an industrial facility outside of its gates. I worked for a large vendor in the 1990s that offered a way to connect engineers like me at their corporate office to a facility that had their DCS. The solution was expensive, low speed, and marginally reliable. However, it did indeed allow me to connect to their DCS to diagnose problems and use engineering tools to fix them without the delay and expense of travel.
Connectivity to a public network in the Industry 3.0 era was too scary to be considered. For example, I upgraded a municipal power plant to the latest DCS and OPC server technology, but all the server machines had their network interface cards removed because they did not want them connected outside the property. Part of the project was to generate reports that were automatically printed on paper every morning.
The Industry 4.0 era is defined as the Internet connectivity of industrial production. To be Industry 4.0 means to accept and embrace the risk of danger on the Internet highway. It means that a DCS that was inherently secure because it was disconnected and proprietary now is open to the outside world. Without this connectivity, you don't have Industry 4.0 and will not get its benefits. Your competitors that do embrace Industry 4.0 and address the risks will leave you in the dust and you will not be able to compete.
It also needs to be understood that there are risks remaining stuck in Industry 3.0. There are the economic risks I already mentioned in which your competitors will leave you behind. There are also obsolescence risks as you remain tied to hardware and software that are made by a single vendor and can reach end of life. I know facilities that today are dependent on eBay for spare parts. That is very risky. But on top of those risks are security risks that are bigger than hackers on the Internet. Do you have locks on the doors to your server room? Do you have default passwords on your computers? Statistically it is a much bigger risk for someone onsite to yank cables, power off machines, or login and mess with your system. Do you have Windows NT running for years with no patches? The most famous intrusion of a virus in an industrial control system was Stuxnet, which came from a USB drive. If you cutoff your system from the rest of the world, your only recourse to install software or copy files might be the USB drive. Do you have a virus scanner and validation for USB drives?
Remaining in Industry 3.0 can be dangerous. Every industrial facility should be thinking about getting on the road to Industry 4.0. Enjoy the drive!
