industrial//industrial automation//OT

**Operational Technology** is everything that physically controls the process: PLC, DCS, SCADA, sensors, drives, robots. Its priorities are safety, availability, determinism and continuity of production.

Operational Technology is everything that physically controls the process: PLC, DCS, SCADA, sensors, drives, robots. Its priorities are safety, availability, determinism and continuity of production.

IT processes business information: servers, cloud, ERP, analytics, databases. Its priorities are data, scalability, integration and applications.

Industrial digitalization is largely the job of connecting OT and IT correctly without destroying the properties OT needs. The connection point is the edge gateway, which speaks industrial protocols on one side and IT languages on the other, and the data layer built on OPC UA and MQTT.

The two cultures also differ in time: an IT system is upgraded every few years, an OT system runs for fifteen to thirty (aftermarket), so the boundary always has legacy on the OT side (data contextualization).