Spencer Cramer on the IoT Uplink: Remote monitoring’s growing significance

The IoT Uplink: The Rapidly Growing Importance Of Remote Monitoring

This week I did a web interview with Jeff Reinke for the latest episode of The IoT Uplink, a new video series examining all the factors driving, influencing and adding to the complexity of the Internet of Things movement.  Jeff's show focuses on the growth and expansion of industrial wireless connections, M2M communication and sensor integration.  I appreciate Jeff's work producing this show because it helps to build an awareness of the business value of the Internet of Things.  By inviting guests to participate Jeff is helping develop the IoT community within manufacturing.

hello and welcome to the iot uplink where we examine all the factors driving influencing and adding to the complexity of the internet of things movement in the manufacturing and product development marketplaces my name is jeff ranke i'm the editorial director of manufacturing.net and advantage business media's manufacturing group joining me the only man to add a softer side to heavy metal music chris fox he's the lead editor on manufacturing.net today's uplink we're going to take a look at a number of things including having a conversation with a leading expert on remote monitoring and industrial iot before we get to that how about some of the facts chris remote monitoring is going to play a crucial role as we lead into the future of the internet of things continues to evolve we've got more data being transmitted from more places all over the globe what does this mean in terms of security what does this mean in terms of getting that data effectively and efficiently to the endpoints thanks jeff well first off microsoft figures that manufacturers stand to gain more than 90 billion dollars annually from the improvements in customer relations and productivity from this data furthermore according to the american society for quality 82 percent of those who have implemented the smart sensing technology have increased efficiency 49 noticed fewer product defects and 45 percent experienced higher customer satisfaction so that reinforces the value in this increased data and sharing communication which is really at the heart of both remote monitoring and industrial iot and to ensure that their networks can handle all this data rockwell says that over half half of manufacturers are currently in the cloud and more than 90 percent are using cloud-based services for email and other business functions and that's just impressive add a little more context to the conversations my pleasure to welcome in spencer cramer spencer is the ceo of ei³ corporation a leading provider of industrial internet remote monitoring and cloud computing technologies welcome to the uplink spencer well thank you jeff it's a real pleasure to be here excellent jumping right into it you know looking at some of the things that are going on some of the biggest challenges or potential obstacles for manufacturers with remote monitoring you've got a lot of data coming from a lot of different places around the globe to essentially one endpoint or as we described before one consumer of that data what are some things manufacturers need to be aware of well that's a very good question i think you know when you consider that uh all of the enthusiasm for the internet of things devices are being put throughout manufacturing facilities that can produce literally oceans of data but the challenge that that we see is converting that data into actionable information because by converting the data into actionable information that's where you can create the business value i like to use the lens of time as a way of understanding how that data can impact an operation you can look at data in terms of the past where you're actually recording and showing different personnel and systems what has been done but if you take that data from the past and you bring it into the present then the data becomes much more actionable and much more immediate you can have alerts that change what people do so that they can create savings whether it's alerts that maybe uh alert about a quality of a product being manufactured or an alert about something that's potentially going wrong when the data becomes the most valuable is when you look at it through the lens of the future predicting what's going to happen with equipment is where you can create the most value so the challenge really is is to deliver those data packages to the consumers that are providing the information in the most relevant format and then what can what can manufacturers do to limit the strain on their network so you know there's a number of ways that you can actually see network strain you know i think that um there's a strain that can be put onto the network by creating security vulnerabilities so when you put a remote monitoring system in place or you put industrial internet things or internet of things devices into a manufacturing facility i think it's important that the manufacturer fully understand what are the implications is this uh just monitoring the device or is it monitoring and offering the ability for that device to be remotely controlled so understanding the the potential vulnerabilities is a key element to reducing strength another form of strain is the strain that comes from bandwidth a lot of times in conversations people express concern about the bandwidth that might be arising from having so many devices producing data our experience is though that if a a network is properly designed people are surprised by how little bandwidth is required to provide really valuable industrial internet information well data security is always a concern so once they've attended to the obvious issues what are some of the issues that are dismissed or go unattended great great question and you know i think that a lot of times people are focusing on the technology of data security and many times overlook the personnel issues that revolve around maintaining a remote monitoring network's security so you know a lot of times we'll recommend to our customers that they integrate the access to the remote monitoring network with their internal directory services that way if there's a change made to what a person's access should be it's made through the directory services and it automatically propagates through to the remote monitoring solution so that's one thing another thing that people often overlook is that when they look at who is supplying them with the remote monitoring services the organization who is supplying those data services needs to be following it security best practices and that's why we use iso 27000 as a way of maintaining our our best practices so that we know who has access to the data when the access was made and what is being done to prevent unauthorized access actually you know i think that was a great point you made spencer about bandwidth concern is not as big a deal when you're doing things the right way taking the right steps and putting things in place put you on the spot here a little bit with our final question everybody wants to look in that crystal ball and see what's going to happen moving forward in your opinion when you look at the internet of things the role remote monitoring is played thus far what are we looking at going forward what do you see in the future okay well very thought provoking um you know the internet of things opens wide doors uh for greater sources of data coming from the manufacturing floor and as we as i said earlier the value of that data can be greatly amplified by processing it with analytics so you know i see that as these devices become more pervasive on the plant floor and the applications become more sophisticated providing actionable information the manufacturing floor is going to come to see that remote monitoring or industrial internet data the remote monitoring cloud as a critical source of information for that plant floor almost like you can't imagine today a sales team that can run without salesforce.com manufacturing floor is going to need its remote monitoring cloud excellent excellent points thanks so much for joining us today on the uplink spencer really appreciate the insight and the thought to learn more about spencer's company and ei³ their products and services go to www.ei³.com that's going to do it for this episode of the iot uplink be sure to follow chris and i on twitter so you can learn more about this program as well as other things going on manufacturing.net as well as the other sites in advantage business media's manufacturing group for chris fox i'm jeff ranke this has been the iot uplink