As we discussed in the previous blog, the border between IT and OT gets more blurred these days, but there is still one. Some of the colleagues, giving the feedback, pointed, that the previous post did not provide the answer to the main question – what is my opinion to IT and OT?
Ok, the previous blog also shouldn’t, but in this, and may be in the following one I will try to bring more beef in the discussion.
Firstly, the term “OT” seems to come from consultants (I even suppose to know who pretends to be the inventor of it), and is mainly used by the IT people, not the OT.
Looks as if the IT people and their consultants were moving through the endless terrain of the IT possibilities, until they came to the big river, where the people lived that already solved most of the problems, the IT could offer to solve… And more than that, they were not ready to replace the solutions, running over years, through the newest IT gadgets and best practices with bling-bling and mirrors on them.
“What’s that??” – asked the… you know, the Chief – the Chief of IT Office.
“These are… these are aborigines… let’s call them ‘OT’” – answered his consultant-man.
“Now I know how are they called, but what are they?” – asked the CIO again.
“Well, you know, the OT… I have heard, they are responsible for operation of all kinds of important things, and they seem to do everything differently”.
“And what shall we do with them?” – asked the CIO.
“Nobody will ever unterstand the OT, so let them operate their stuff as long as we are inventing their world new”.
So, or similar, should this story be, as most of the OT descriptions seem to be done by the people, that met something unknown and tried to describe it somehow. The majority of OT people have never defined what „OT“ is, and even worse, in most of the cases they do not know that this term exists.
If you look at the definitions of OT in internet you will notice, that most of them are:
- Descriptive. They do not define, they try do describe what are we talking about. There is nothing wrong with it, but I’m normally rather sceptical about those descriptive definitions. They remind me the Plato’s definition of a Man as “a biped, without feathers.” And normally they reflect the poor understanding of the topic.
- Archaic. This is one of the descriptions: “OT was used primarily in industrial control systems for manufacturing, transportation and utilities – and unlike information technology, the technology that controlled operations in those industries was not networked. Many of the tools for monitoring or making adjustments to physical devices were mechanical and those that did have digital controls used closed, proprietary protocols.” (source) Tears are coming in my eyes. In the days as this generation of OT came into operation (mid 70-s), the IT itself was busy with perforated cards and it was 20 years before invention of Internet.
- Artificially reduced. “Operational technology (OT) is hardware and software that detects or causes a change through the direct monitoring and/or control of physical devices, processes and events in the enterprise.” (Gartner)
- Bi-pole. “There is one pole, representing obviously simplified reduced IT and another pole, representing obviously simplified reduced OT”. And something in between that has to be converged via IoT. (like in the following example from the very interesting article on Industrial Ethernet Book)
Whats wrong with all that?
Ok, firstly, the free-form description of an object, business area or technology instead of definition brings us to the problem, that person, trying to work in this area never really understands what is it all about. There is a well-known example with SOA, where one has thousands of articles on the topic, but no real definition of it.
Secondly, the archaic presentation of OT ignores the last 5 to 15 years of development of technology in both IT and OT worlds (see also my previous post). It’s not now that the convergence between IT and OT begun. For the Utilities it begun around year 2000 on the technology level, and around year 2010 on the infrastructure convergence level. Most probably there are the business areas where it begun earlier and for sure there are areas that are facing this change only now – all depends upon complexity of the business processes and general needs of internal business integration. It also makes the OT to look primitive and complicates the further integration of both areas.
The artificially reduced definition of OT makes it easy to get the first understanding of the topic, but brings the huge uncertainty when one faces the real-life application environment of the complex company (of which the utilities, especially TSOs are the good example).
And, finally, the bi-pole description of IT-OT problem brings though the main artificially reduced aspects of the both worlds, but leaves absolutely blank the whole huge area between them.
And this is exactly the area where all the activities are being carried on.
This is the area where the so popular nowadays “IT-OT convergence” happens, this is the area where the IoT shall be applied, this is the area where the IT architects shall decide if the application belongs to the IT or OT world, and hence underlies this or that policies, restrictions, protections, etc.
To finish this post and to satisfy the wish of my colleagues to be more specific I would suggest the first draft of the first definition of OT:
“OT is what you need to operate your end-devices and everything you have to have to do it in efficient, safe, secure, and finally successful way”.
And a little bit descriptive, to add details:
“OT is a set of IT-based technologies and solutions used to control the physical devices – normally in the factory or in the field.
OT takes the IT technology as a basis and has no problem extending or changing it if this is necessary to solve the problem – IT is not a dogma for OT, but the direction to act.
OT solutions are highly robust, and were designed to run in the protected environment.
OT solutions include a lot of specific know-how about the business or process. (e.g. about power grid, chemical processes or hospital business)
Nowadays OT can include components, not directly involved into the monitoring and control of the physical devices, but necessary to support these tasks. (e.g. State Estimator and network security analysis for the electric SCADA).”
What is the difference to the classical definitions, like the ones above? It’s exactly that in my eyes the OT is since a long time not only primary control devices, RTUs/PLCs and SCADA, but also EMS/DMS, online analysis and expert systems, advanced visualisation and control – everything that is necessary to operate the system in, yes, „efficient and successful way“.
And in the next post I would like to address the topic of quality and fitting-for-purpose of IT and OT solutions.
also on LinkedIn
