There are various ways with which security challenges can be minimised
Published on : Saturday 20-08-2022
Utpal Chakraborty, Chief Digital Officer, Allied Digital Services Ltd.
Seamless connectivity seems to be a topic arousing much interest. Why would production entities need to have autonomous communication?
Production and logistics networks used to be highly complex in nature and it became very difficult to manage the communication among different entities for a central planning and control system.
Hence, it demands adaptive and autonomous communication architecture to cater to such needs. An autonomous decentralised communication and control systems for production and logistic processes is the right approach.
Is the need for real time communication also experienced over the enterprise boundaries? For example, with the vendor subsystems, with delivery subsystems? How about across multiple plants?
Real time communication both within and outside the boundaries of an enterprise are very important to address the transactional needs of different systems and subsystems involved in delivering a business outcome. The same goes for communicating with the vendor ecosystem and across multiple plants.
Historically major vendors have developed their own communication interfaces and protocols. Each such protocol was embraced by their partners. Equally, since ages there has been a call out for open protocols from the side of major buyers. What actually defines an open protocol? When can a system be said to support an open protocol?
Some of the major benefits of the open protocol ecosystem are – it provides a great flexibility while establishing communication among devices and systems coming from various manufacturers with their proprietary protocols into an ecosystem where all such devices and systems are expected to communicate in a seamless manner. It also saves a huge cost, eliminates vendor lock-in and also brings agility to the entire value chain. One problem could be security if not considered seriously, but having said that today we have quite comprehensive security arrangements to deal with such scenarios.
How do upcoming technologies propose to deal with this topic? Such technologies include Cloud systems, Big Data Systems and more?
Cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence can play a major role here. In fact it’s already happening in many solutions wherein intelligent integration mechanisms powered with machine learning have already been implemented. In a hybrid cloud and multi-cloud kind of an environment, efficient integration architecture is of paramount importance. Of course, Big Data, Data Lakes and Data Fabrics can contribute hugely for building an ecosystem with a seamless, decentralised, open protocol communication landscape.
Does use of Open communication compromise on cybersecurity aspects?
There are security concerns around Open communication but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be secured. There are various ways with which security challenges can be minimised or nullified in such an ecosystem. Nevertheless, security concerns if any should be dealt with utmost care while designing such architecture.
Utpal Chakraborty is Chief Digital Officer at Allied Digital Services Ltd. A former Head of Artificial Intelligence at YES Bank, he is an eminent Data Scientist, AI researcher and Strategist, having 21 years of industry experience, including working as Principal Architect in L&T Infotech, IBM, Capgemini and other MNCs in his past assignments. Utpal is a well-known researcher, writer and speaker on Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Agile & Lean at conferences around the world.
His recent research on machine learning titled “Layered Approximation for Deep Neural Networks” has been appreciated in different premier conferences, institutions, and universities.