Industrial Monitoring’s Maturity Challenge: From Reactive to Proactive

Summary

A frustrating gap still exists between expectation and reality in Industrial 4.0. Of course, sectors like manufacturing have come a long way with new sensors and smart systems making tomorrow’s functionality possible today–predictive maintenance that prevents failures before they occur, real-time optimization that maximizes throughput and interconnected systems that deliver unprecedented operational visibility. However, roadblocks still stand in the way of how we monitor, protect and automate these ecosystems. Marrying legacy infrastructure with next-generation digitization and insight remains a difficult needle to thread.
 
Looking ahead, the next logical step involves transitioning from solid monitoring foundations to fully automated systems. The good news is that most teams are better positioned to achieve this than they might realize. Paessler's recent survey of more than 1200 infrastructure managers and network admins highlights consistent ecosystem challenges in the form of complex protocols and fragmented tools creating automation gaps. But many understand the pain points in front of them and are striving to graduate from reactive to proactive monitoring and observability. Let’s dig deeper into what admins are seeing and saying.
 

There’s still a lot happening on-premises

Everyone wants to capture the benefits of digitization and reach peak efficiency, but achieving it securely and seamlessly is no easy feat. Three-quarters of survey respondents operate on-premises infrastructure. These environments require solutions that can merge decades-old machinery with state-of-the-art sensors and optimization tools, not just cloud-native platforms.
 
However, leaders know they must tread carefully since legacy infrastructure can create both a potential productivity bottleneck and an attack vector. This is because legacy PLCs, RTUs and other controls equipment, once air-gapped for security, now connect to enterprise networks. Interpreting and integrating protocols such as Modbus, MQTT and OPC UA are crucial in bridging the gap between the old and new. The opportunity is significant for teams that can successfully walk this tech tightrope–enabling reduced mean times to repair and operational visibility while keeping legacy endpoints secure.

Balancing tool fragmentation and security

With an ever-increasing number of endpoints and environments to manage, admins also report requiring multiple monitoring tools. Nearly half of the admins surveyed use additional specialized tools alongside their primary monitoring solution as they require extra functionality (47%), more granularity (28%), or work in organizations where different departments have varying preferences (23%).
 
While this can help provide comprehensive coverage, multiple tools struggle to deliver the "single pane of glass" that 25% of admins rank as a top priority in monitoring, notably given they could choose up to three from 17 options. This fragmentation can mean that admin attention is spread thin across dashboards and interfaces, a worrying reality when hackers only need one backdoor to hold production hostage. Knowing industrial sectors are more likely to pay to get back online, hackers target this “uptime trap” with ransomware attacks surging almost 50% quarter-on-quarter. Clearly, admins going forward need to find the right balance between visibility, security, and convenience.

Graduating to more mature monitoring

Achieving these three things in tandem requires a high level of monitoring maturity. ANother data point of interest indicates that, for many teams, there’s still room for growth in this direction. On a sliding scale from level 1 to level 5 of monitoring maturity, about 65% of respondents rank themselves as level 2 or lower. This level–alarm/notification-based monitoring–means that admins will receive warnings when something’s happening and hopefully have enough time to respond. One quarter (23%) are a level up with control functions (automation) in play.
 
These capabilities represent progress but always-on systems and always-active hackers demand evolving to higher monitoring levels. Combining actionable data with intuitive systems helps achieve the holy grail of industrial monitoring–using intelligent systems to predict events. Then, armed with this information ahead of time, smart systems can recommend preventive steps. This one-two punch of early warnings and anticipatory measures is often the difference in stopping would-be hackers in their tracks. Further, these abilities work to unlock predictive maintenance and provide additional insight into the factory floor.
 
Our survey shows that teams know what they’re up against and are working diligently to close the monitoring gap, achieve industrial automation, and thread that most difficult of needles. It’s heartening to see companies with an eye on best practices integrating retrofitting efforts and deploying distributed monitoring architecture for legacy infrastructure. They’re also breaking down silos between information and operational technology teams, and establishing baselines to detect anomalies at a glance.
 
The most successful organizations start by conducting protocol audits to understand exactly what industrial communications they need to support, then prioritize unified platforms that can reduce fragmentation while maintaining the specialized functionality required across departments.
 
With a watchful eye on both emerging threats and potential production efficiencies, leaders and admins alike are working to close the expectation-reality gap of Industry 4.0. Graduating from reactive to proactive ecosystem defenses is well within their grasp–it’s now time for companies to update their networks in lock-step with the march of automation.