This article offers highlights from a recent newsletter featuring Gartner content. Learn how digital businesses can stay competitive by adopting an edge computing strategy.

When the future is indefinitely smart machines and everything and anything can be a service, you must stop to ask yourself, when does it makes sense for industrial operations to take this on? As we embark on the next revolution with Industry 4.0 and the digital transformation IA is undertaking, is the OT infrastructure ready for XaaS?

This first article in our new virtualization series details the evolution of this technology while highlighting the importance of hardware and availability.

For most the path to IIoT will be an evolutionary journey. Before you can start to tap the potential of next-generation, big data-driven, intelligent automation, you must modernize the foundation on which it is built. And that means taking a hard look at existing operational technology. Modernizing your infrastructure will deliver incredible benefits in terms of reliability and manageability to create a future-proof platform to build your organization’s IIoT strategy.

Large Fortune 500 companies with deep pockets are investing in IIoT technologies. These projects are yielding results, although implementations are not without their challenges. An increasing number of industrial companies are looking at ways to leverage analytics, outside of the traditional applications that helped them on the production side. Some have a clear idea of what they want to achieve, some are trying to understand what various technologies could do for them. What does seem clear is that some form of IT/OT convergence and collaboration is necessary to achieve success.

Stratus’s Downtime Prevention Buyer’s Guide, explains that the reason downtime negatively impacts all this rich, in-flight data is because, “When a system outage occurs all data and transactions not yet written to disk are at risk of being lost or corrupted.” This means data that could be used to predict and prevent future catastrophes may be lost forever.

How do you safeguard your organization and the customers that rely on its accessibility? When you are working with an availability solutions vendor, it’s important to establish which system will provide the fastest recovery time. Or best yet, which system will ensure that your customers don’t even realize the car has crashed when your server goes down.

In this previously published IoT Evolution article, Stratus’ VP of business line management, Jason Andersen, discusses how industrial IoT gateway systems can be adequate, but relying on them for business-critical use in production environments could introduce new levels of risk. It also includes his insight into how to manage this risk.