The five greatest challenges ahead for manufacturing
NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE
A modern cloud-first network infrastructure is essential to the performance of today's leading manufacturers. Besides connecting suppliers, staff and customers, it is the foundation of the Smart Factory, a highly digitalised and connected production facility, "the factory of the future,'' according to Gartner.
Early adopters of the Smart Factory must put in place robust multi-cloud-enabled network infrastructures which can support the latest technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), alongside giving secure access to corporate applications in a scalable and agile manner.
You can monitor the status of production and receive real-time data about your products and deliveries, collect data for error analysis and process evaluation, recommend actions and introduce autonomous working through Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The proliferation of cloud applications, coupled with legacy architecture, means that it’s an important first step to get the network infrastructure right.
According to McKinsey, Smart Factory implementations are not without difficulty: "Organisational challenges, technology, cost, cybersecurity, interoperability, and installation have resulted in 70% of manufacturers being unable to scale beyond pilots".
The security threat landscape is rapidly becoming more sophisticated.
IoT, cloud, edge computing, and the proliferation of connected devices all function as potential entry points into an organisation’s network, which is increasingly difficult to secure. Add in the forced move to hybrid work environments and the use of personal devices for corporate tasks, protecting and securing company data is an ongoing challenge.
Frameworks such as secure access service edge (SASE), that combine VPN and SD-WAN capabilities with cloud-native security functions, are becoming an effective way to target the shifting enterprise network perimeter, by merging network and security services into one.
Gartner projects that by 2024, at least 40% of all enterprises will have explicit strategies to adopt SASE, which can be integrated with existing SD-WANs.
CEVA Logistics’ Karl Prag says: “We need to make sure they are connected from end-to-end, connected by data, in a way where we can quickly reformat the whole process when needed and restructure.”