For the industrial Internet of Things, defense in depth is a requirement

Enlarge / Sensors, sensors everywhere! (credit: Getty / 7postman)

Ars yesterday wrote a big feature on the concept of “Industry 4.0,” the fancy-sounding name that describes the ongoing shift in how products are created from raw materials and distributed along the supply chain to customers.

What the “4.0” revision adds compared to Industries 1.0 through 3.0 is a complex set of linkages between information and operational technologies. (IT stores, transmits, and manipulates data, while “OT” detects and causes changes in physical processes, such as devices for manufacturing or climate control.)

It’s a modular and flexible approach to manufacturing that creates digital links among “smart factories” that are powered by the industrial Internet of Things, big data, and machine learning. And that’s almost enough fancy CEO words to make bingo. At least in this case, the buzzwords aren’t just important-sounding but ultimately meaningless concepts. Similar to how the rise of devops welded programming with operations, making the manufacturing process smarter by stuffing in all those buzzwords really is causing fundamental changes in how things are made.