Server, storage and networking architectures are being optimized for operation in low power, space constrained edge environments that used to be solely the domain of OT. But the challenge for the technology professionals now tasked with looking after the many different elements involved can still have very different perspectives on their roles and responsibilities.
IT professionals are more likely to find deploying and connecting edge infrastructure a challenge than OT pros. That might not be surprising when an upgrade at a retail chain could mean staffers visiting hundreds, even thousands, of individual sites. That's a lot of time and expertise sucked up before anyone even touches a computer.
This difference also feeds through to differences in how IT and OT teams view edge investment decisions. For OT pros, the top ranked consideration was purchasing edge infrastructure, named by 38 percent, while tracking edge infrastructure products as they ship was named by 31 percent. A key element is its use of blueprints to manage orchestration and ensure consistency in the underlying instances and infrastructure applications are running on. The blueprints are, effectively, templates encapsulating the correct application settings, infrastructure resources, network configurations, workflows, and scripts for a given workload.
This frees up time for IT and OT professionals, but also ensures that tasks are accomplished correctly at scale."IT staff don't feel rushed and compromised with security," says Chiodelli,"While at the same time OT people don't feel they're slowed down."It's not hard to see how this reflects and plays into the principles behind modern software development practices such as DevOps, continuous integration and delivery, and the associated workloads.