Industry Insights
Getting Data Off the Shop Floor: OT and IT Integration
Updated June 21, 2022By the CalliArc team
Key takeaway
Start by reading data out, never by writing into control systems. An edge gateway that speaks the machine protocols, buffers locally, and pushes one-way into your IT network gives you visibility within weeks without touching the safety and availability guarantees the plant runs on.
Most plants already generate the data needed to understand throughput, downtime, and quality. It sits inside controllers and machine terminals that were never intended to share it, and the gap between that and a dashboard is an integration problem with unusual constraints.
Why OT isn't like IT
- Availability outranks everything. A line stopping costs more per hour than most IT incidents cost in total.
- Equipment lifecycles run decades, on operating systems and protocols that predate modern security practice.
- Changes are governed by safety cases — you cannot patch a controller the way you patch a server.
- Plant engineers are accountable for the line, and their caution about your integration is well earned.
A staged integration approach
- Start read-only. Collect data; don't command equipment. This removes the safety objection almost entirely.
- Put an edge gateway on the plant network that speaks the machine protocols — OPC UA where available, Modbus and vendor protocols where not.
- Buffer at the edge so a network outage doesn't lose production data, and pre-aggregate to control bandwidth.
- Push one-way through a firewall or data diode into the IT network. Nothing from IT initiates a connection into OT.
- Land the data in a time-series store, then serve it to the dashboards and systems that need it.
What to collect first
- Machine state and downtime reasons — the foundation of OEE and the fastest business win.
- Cycle counts and throughput per line and per shift.
- Quality and scrap events, tied to the batch and the machine.
- Process variables that correlate with defects — temperature, pressure, speed.
Practical warnings
- Tag naming and units will be inconsistent between machines and vendors; budget a mapping exercise.
- Clock synchronisation matters more than expected — unsynchronised machine clocks make cross-line analysis meaningless.
- Segment the OT network and log access; visibility projects often expose that this was never done.
- Involve plant engineering from day one. Their trust is the critical path, and losing it stops the project regardless of the technology.