There is a strong convergence between IT & OT systems while building smart networks

Subhashish Gupta, Country Manager India & SAARC, Allied Telesys

“There is a very blurring gap between an IT and OT network. Till recently we used to talk about IT networks to be driven by the CIOs of the organization or the CXOs of the organization or a VP-IT and then there was operational technologies network which was being driven by somebody else. But today there is a blurring gap. There is a strong convergence in terms of the best practices that you need to consider while building your smart networks. So, there are five typical key pain points which any organization faces with respect to its network infrastructure. One is the Technology device failure; Cybersecurity – a big subject matter and is crucial from a network infrastructure point of view; Disaster - what if your hardware based controller fails, does it mean that all your IP applications go for a toss; Human error that you can't forget that when you are building processes or during deploying complex systems, there is a relevance of human error which comes into picture; and the ISP outages. So, if your network infrastructure is down for a minute, the average loss that Gartner defines on a per minute basis is $5,600. So that's the kind of impact which businesses have. So, what are the outcomes expected as a CIO or CEO or somebody who's having a team and is aspiring to build a complete smart network infrastructure? When I mentioned about technology device failure, we are talking about automated recovery. It implies how fast your network infrastructure recovers if there is an outage. This is where the concept of a platform which offers you a seamless kind of experience where human interference or involvement is very limited, comes into the picture.”