Figure 3-1 : IT / OT convergence and trustworthiness .
Even before the days of digitization , traditional OT was well versed on the importance of the concepts of safety , reliability , and resilience of the operation .
In the early days of computing ( starting in the 1950s ), computer executions were batched : Data input was uploaded as punch cards into the computer and the output came back as a print-out after a reasonable time . There was no direct interaction with humans and no process of automatic execution in loops with conditions . Thus , the concepts of reliability and resilience of the service were not a high priority . Real interaction with users started many years later with terminals and today – with network-connected systems , internet communication , cloud computing , and websites – IT has become fully operational .
An example is real-time behavior : Visitors to websites and clients calling cloud services or database requests all expect reasonable response times with a maximum timeout . Cloud services are extremely reliable : For example , the consequences of unexpected hardware crashes or software bugs can be solved with quick automatic restarts inside the service , mostly invisible to the client . Another example is resilience : If a web service , representing an on-line shopping system is partially down , it most likely can still accept orders even though the automatic processing is delayed or temporarily switched to manual execution by humans .
So many demands from traditional OT like real-time behavior , high reliability , or resilience are already well-understood by implementers of modern IT and no longer part of any IT / OT convergence . Therefore , the IT side can deliver best practices around such things to the OT side .
But safety requirements from the OT side are relatively new to the IT side . The reason for safety is based solely on physical operation of the OT side , which is still unknown and hardly understood by the IT side , even with a lot of experience in digital operation . So , a better understanding of the whole IoT landscape would be distinguishing between traditional ( non-operational ) IT with file management , emails , web browsing , etc . and Operational IT with real time and reliability
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