Needless to say, plants and factories attach great importance to security and automation. Traditionally in manufacturing settings, security and industrial automation are separate systems working in silos, which leads to certain disadvantages. Integrating them on a unified platform, on the other hand, brings various benefits.
Security systems
Plants and factories face various types of threats, including theft and intrusion. Protecting workers and assets is therefore highly prioritized. As such, security systems play a key role in manufacturing environments.
“Manufacturing facilities rely on a combination of physical security technologies to protect people, assets and operations. Common solutions include video surveillance cameras, access control systems, intrusion detection sensors, perimeter protection technologies and fire and life-safety systems. These technologies help organizations monitor activity, control access to sensitive areas, detect potential threats and respond quickly to incidents,” said Andreas Beerbaum, VP of Global Physical Security Sales and Service at Octave.
In particular, video surveillance combined with AI analytics is gaining traction in manufacturing environments.
“Video security cameras are one of the most used security devices for protecting factory and manufacturing environments. Especially when enhanced with cloud and AI capabilities, these devices provide visual insight into the processes that comprise a manufacturing organization. They can be the sources of evidence for investigations into workplace compliance as well as alerting tools to aid in the prevention of incidents,” said Daniel Barker, Technical Sales Engineer at OpenEye.
“With AI and advanced video analytics, cameras can automatically identify access to restricted areas, people in unauthorized zones or situations that may pose a risk to personnel or operations,” said Tamer Mohannad, Regional Sales Manager for ME&A at SCATI. “When this information is combined with other systems, an alarm is no longer just an isolated signal; it becomes a contextualized event.”
Industrial automation solutions
Today, in the era of Industry 4.0, industrial automation has become more important than ever, helping plants achieve further efficiency and productivity. Manufacturers thus turn to industrial automation systems, which consist of a variety of sensors and devices.
“Industrial automation has a much broader set of devices because they are directly involved in measuring, controlling and executing the manufacturing process. These include sensors such as temperature sensors, pressure sensors, flow and vibration sensors and accelerometers. There are also automation control solutions such as PLC, DCS, SCADA, HMI, industrial PCs, industrial gateways, industrial ethernet switches and drives/controllers. There are also actuators, or devices that change the physical process – motors, valves, pumps, conveyors and heating/cooling devices,” said Poornima Bethmangalkar, Head of the Industrial, Manufacturing, Energy and Utilities Industry Group at Happiest Minds.
Roberto Licari, ONVIF Ambassador, said industrial automation can be viewed from a broader perspective. “Today any technological ‘object’ that delivers data is a sensor. The thermometer measuring a welding area for a stable temperature is a sensor. The video analysis counting pieces is a sensor. The smoke detector is a sensor for environmental conditions. Even the access control anti-passback feature that guarantees only authorized people are inside the area where medicines are produced is a sensor, as it avoids the incident before it happens,” he said.
Challenges of siloed approach
Security and industrial automation systems both play important roles in industrial settings. Yet today, for the most part, both systems work independently in silos in plants and factories.
“In many industrial facilities, physical security, IT and operational technology (OT) still operate as separate environments. These systems may work perfectly well independently; the problem arises when an incident involves information from several of them. An industrial system may report that a machine has stopped while the video system has recorded the event, but without integration the operator must manually reconstruct what happened,” Mohannad said.
Ultimately, this siloed approach is not conducive to a plant’s security, operational efficiency and productivity.
“The problem is often not a lack of information, but the fragmentation of that information. Moving between different systems to locate video, check access events or reconstruct a sequence increases verification time, workload and the potential for error. The outcome can also become too dependent on the individual operator's experience,” Mohannad said.
“The challenge with this siloed approach is that valuable information remains isolated. When an operational alarm occurs, personnel may need to dispatch someone to investigate before understanding what happened. This can delay decision-making, extend downtime and increase operational costs,” Beerbaum said. “Without integration, organizations may miss opportunities to combine operational data with contextual information such as video or spatial monitoring or access events. That additional context can often help teams evaluate incidents more quickly, determine root causes faster and respond more effectively.”
Benefits of integration
On the other hand, if security and industrial automation are well integrated, manufacturers can benefit in various ways.
“Integrating security and industrial automation systems in a unified platform provides greater visibility into each individual event. It takes the sensor (or other system) data and ties it to corresponding video. Instead of receiving an environmental sensor and not being able to verify what’s occurring, an integrated video security camera system can give manufacturing teams the visual element they need to quickly watch a camera feed and confirm what’s happening,” Barker said.
Bethmangalkar summarizes additional benefits as follows:
Improved security: instead of isolated alerts, integrated view and improved threat detection can be achieved;
Improved safety: upon an event, for example a gas leak, the platform can trigger alarms, evacuation workflow, machine shutdown, emergency response and incident notification;
Better productivity: Security information can become input for operational processes; for example, worker movement can lead to optimized material flow;
Predictive operations: By combining machine telemetry, maintenance, environmental, security and workforce data, impending machine failure can be predicted and dealt with.
Licari, meanwhile, mentions that “unified” does not have to mean single-vendor. “When devices expose standard, conformance-tested interfaces such as the ONVIF profiles, you keep the freedom to pick the best device for each job and still manage everything on one platform. That is interoperability by design instead of integration by exception,” he said.