Plant & Works Engineering October 2022

10 | Plant & Works Engineering www.pwemag.co.uk October 2022 Insight – Talking Industry: Review T he session opened with an introduction by Aurel Buda (Turck). He emphasised how everything is opening up: “Traditional automation networks used to have a closed system, with sensors and actuators being connected and communicating bidirectionally with a PLC network,” he said. “Nowadays, sensors, actuators and edge controllers connect remotely via industrial Ethernet. Devices connect not just to PLCs but to SCADA, MES systems or cloud services. a couple of years, we will see systems that need to get firmware patches for security reasons, perhaps nearly every day or every week, just as happens with our IT infrastructure. Adding that to safety systems is a game changer. It is still challenging to have standards that allow for security patches, even in safety systems. Currently, the core protocols are not intrinsically safe.” Buda’s introduction was backed up by Luke Orehawa (Nidec). He stated that, as a The future of safety engineering is digital The future of safety engineering and manufacturing and processing now focuses around the digital and this creates new opportunities and challenges for plants operators, and enables them to enhance efficiency, increase flexibility, while making their plants more safe and secure. Andy Pye, Talking Industry Chair looks at some of the discussion points. Talking Industry “This means that there are many more points for intruders to attack a system. Despite early attacks having happened years ago, we are still at an early stage of security awareness. Currently, I see companies that are very aware of cybersecurity and industrial networks, but I also see companies that are not cyber-aware. “Most customers really don’t like is to change anything on their systems, such as firmware updates. This is where we are just at an early stage. In