Beyond IT-OT integration - Transforming to Cloud & Edge Computing to enable Industry 4.0, AI & ML Capabilities

IT-OT integration is at the core of Industry 4.0, as many use cases require combining and reasoning with data from both OT and IT systems in utilizing data science models, advanced analytics, machine learning and AI to enable insights based cognitive and digital ways of working. As part of the digital transformation, few of the leading industrial products, oil and gas, downstream & chemicals manufacturing companies have already embarked on this journey by initiating data engineering and data integration efforts, developing or implementing data information management systems and by building massive plant and enterprise data lakes. These will facilitate implementation of advanced analytics and AI use case pilots / MVPs for integrated and collaborative operations and scaling up to production to realize the proposed business benefits. At the same time, many of the enterprise and industrial systems have been or are being transformed and migrated to public and private clouds / datacenters due to the cost and efficiency and strategic advantages. Given the above context, the leading companies need to start thinking in terms of "Cloud" and "Edge" computing capabilities with an objective to "centralize where you can in public & private clouds, distribute when you have to the edge".