Operation & Technology:
Digitalization, Governance and Security
7 & 8 Jun 2023
Toledo OH, USA – Owens Corning
As manufacturing and other forms of operations, the “OT” environment, go through their own digital transformation, opportunities challenges abound. On the one hand there is the promise of cost reductions, safety benefits, efficiency gains, and the capture and use of OT data. But the digitalization of these environments brings many challenges including a change in operating paradigms and culture in operations, and growing cyber security concerns as a once-closed set of systems/machines is connected. Similar changes are occurring in commercial/product technology spaces. The changes in the OT ecosystem, increasingly driven by software, and the difficulty of integrating the rapid development culture of info tech with the long-term investment and uptime mentality of OT is a big challenge.
These changes, combined with connecting of these ops environments to other parts of the enterprise, partners and vendors, make keeping the OT environment secure ever more difficult. Much of the expertise in software management, updating/patching, etc. resides in IT and cybersecurity within enterprises, yet these functions don’t have the understanding of the cadence and process rigor of ops environments, creating a need for dialogue, a meeting of the minds and melding of experience between OT and IT.