Not all Big Data is created equal. Data connected with the Industrial Internet– that is, data produced by industrial equipment such as wind turbines, jet engines, and MRI devices– holds more potential business value on a size-adjusted basis than other kinds of Big Data associated with the social Internet, consumer Internet and other sources.
This is due to the nature of the market sectors whose high-value possessions produce most of Industrial Internet data. Industrial sectors such as health care, energy, and transport impact results throughout geographic, socio-economic and industrial limits.
Leveraging the Industrial Internet and the torrent of data being developed by industrial devices presents many opportunities to improve efficiencies of current operations in the impacted market sectors. Better are the new business designs and approaches for delivering services that can be established through the Industrial Internet and Big Data analytics.
To genuinely leverage the Industrial Internet throughout these and other industry sectors, new platforms, data models and analytic capabilities are needed. With this, there are couple of strict requirements for innovations to meet in specifying and sizing the Industrial Internet. These requirements are summarized below, with illustrations taken from the healthcare, energy and transports market sectors.
Scalability
Data volumes related to the Industrial Internet are growing at two times the pace of other sources of Big Data, including social networks. A single wind farm comprised of 500 turbines develops as much as 2 petabytes of data annually, as an example. And each new generation of industrial devices includes more sensors and creates ever more data. Any platform made use of to collect, shop and assess Industrial Internet Big Data must, therefore, be linearly scalable and make the most of open options such as Hadoop.
High Accessibility
As discussed, even a fairly quick power outage can cost the effected location millions of dollars in lost performance and other expenses. In healthcare situations, the loss of operational capacity is actually a matter of life or death. And the consequences of a jet engine failure in mid-flight are evident. Plainly, platforms to support the Industrial Internet need to be extremely offered and contain multiple failover and immediate recovery capabilities.
High Security
Cyber-warfare and cyber-crime is on the increase. Both state and non-state actors are increasingly attacking facilities targets such as energy grids and national defense assets through the Internet. In healthcare scenarios, personal medical information is covered by numerous security and privacy regulations. Industrial Internet platforms therefore must be highly secure and be continuously reinforced with new methods to keep up with developing threats.
Flexibility and Openness
The Industrial Internet is made up of a lot of innovations, software, and machines to count. The results are numerous data types, numerous workload requirements, and numerous analytic requirements. Some analytic processes, for example, must occur on edge devices, while other analytic workloads are better run in centralized or cloud environments. In some markets, regulations stipulate that specific data must live inside business firewalls and not in public cloud environments. Any platform utilized to leverage the Industrial Internet must be flexible to accommodate this heterogeneous and ever-changing environment of innovations and open requirements. Further, where possible industry-wide standards should be developed and adhered to.
Orchestration
While initial Industrial Internet applications will likely focus on single applications, eventually business in industrial sectors will want to orchestrate several applications to work intelligently together with the goal of enhancing their entire operational environments. The results of one analytic procedure, for circumstances, will kick-off a series of corresponding actions, which lead to further analytics and yet more consequential actions. It is critical that an extremely networked platform to support this type of environment give companies the ability to model and define these workflows and incorporate machine learning to optimize analytic decision-making in real-time.
Another inhibitor to the development of the Industrial Internet is creation of the data itself. While it is true that increasingly more industrial machines are being outfitted with data-generating sensing units, many white areas still have to be filled. Jet engine makers cannot simply put new sensing units on engines any place they please. As small and light as modern-day sensing units are, they still impact the physical operations of equipment, and their implementation must be accounted for in the design process.
Beyond technology requirements, policy and legal issues must also be addressed to fully leverage the Industrial Internet. Depending on industry, certain data types can not be shared with certain parties. In the commercial airline industry, for example, policies prohibit certain flight data being shared with the airlines. In the case of nuclear power plants, most data sources can not be connected to the general public Internet by law. These and other issues that hamper data sharing, and gain access to must be addressed.
