Darryl van der Peijl
More than you think
In most organizations, IT and OT live in separate worlds. IT focuses on centralized management, scalability, and standardization. OT focuses on availability, safety, and continuity. These priorities clash, especially when IT wants to manage systems remotely while OT policy dictates that nothing communicates outbound.
A practical example: IT wants to patch and reboot on a fixed schedule. OT wants the production line to keep running. IT wants firewalls and segmentation. OT wants the PLC to communicate with the MES system without delay. IT wants standardization. OT has legacy systems that have been running for twenty years and that nobody dares to touch.
An (external) case study from Belden, a specialist in industrial networking, shows the cost of poor integration. A manufacturer of architectural aluminum ran 24/7 operations. The entire production process depended on a network managed by IT.
The problem: nearly three times per week, the network went down for unexplained reasons. Each outage cost at least 20 to 30 minutes of downtime per production line. IT pointed to the PLC hardware as the cause. The controls engineer on the factory side knew the PLCs were fine.
The problem was not that IT and OT were working together. The problem was that IT treated the OT environment as an extension of the office network. Only when they adapted the network architecture to the requirements of the production environment, with industrial hardware and OT-specific configuration, did the outages stop. Six months without a single network issue. Productivity, revenue, and delivery times improved immediately.
The lesson: convergence does not mean putting everything on the same stack. It means IT and OT working together based on a shared understanding of each other’s requirements. IT delivers management and standardization. OT determines the hardware and latency requirements. A platform like Azure Local supports that model: you manage centrally via Azure, but the local infrastructure is configured for the demands of the production environment.
OT networks require different hardware and different priorities than IT networks. Convergence does not mean merging everything. It means deliberately separating where needed and integrating where possible.
OT/IT convergence is not just about technology. It is about governance: who owns the OT network? Who decides on changes? Who carries the SLA toward production?
A platform that runs locally but is cloud-connected solves part of the problem. You get centralized visibility without IT having to manage every switch on the factory floor. But without clear agreements on roles and responsibilities, the tension persists.
The market numbers confirm this direction. According to IDC, global spending on edge computing will reach approximately $261 billion in 2025, with expected growth to $380 billion by 2028. Manufacturing & Resources is the second largest sector in those expenditures after Retail, accounting for a quarter of the total.
Want to know what this looks like for your organization? Get in touch.
This article is part of the longread Factory of the Future.
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