Manufacturing is expected to come back with a bang after the turbulence caused multiple issues that have severely disrupted supply chains and led to consumers stockpiling goods. Major events can have significant affects on manufacturing operations and while no-one can predict what is around the corner, manufacturers can look to a few trends that may help in protecting them against whatever comes next.
Manufacturers are looking to fix weaknesses in their operations by embracing digital transformation. In this way, these firms will re-engineer systems and operations to become more resilient to future risks. Manufacturers will try to fix areas of weakness and individual challenges on a case-by-case basis.
Hackers are targeting the manufacturing sector more than ever before as attackers look to steal valuable intellectual property and hold victims to ransom by locking up critical systems and demanding payment.
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors, cameras, and other “smart” technologies are populating industrial environments and bloating the attack surface. These technologies yield measurable economic advantages in terms of productivity and efficiency, but they also open new attack vectors for hackers to exploit. Organisations embracing the IoT must look to develop new security frameworks that span the entire cyber physical stack, from device-level authentication to application-level security.
The Internet of Things (IoT) looks set to change how manufacturers run in 2021. Embedded computers in machinery used throughout the manufacturing process, allow devices to not only communicate with each other, but also to automate systems to increase efficiencies and decrease costly downtime for maintenance using predictive modelling.
Manufacturers need to have the right connectivity in place to enable connected devices to talk to each other. This means considering how these devices connect to each other within and across different locations.
This decade will see more use of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tap into trends people might not be able to spot, creating such insights completely automatically so that manufacturers can make more informed decisions.
This will be necessary to have as the increased growth in the use of industrial IoT sensors will lead to vast amounts of data to be processed. Using ML and AI will ensure such data is processed at speed to produce important insights.
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