How you set your factory network up can make or break your Industry 4.0 initiatives. This fact is probably underappreciated, but if the network is not optimized, despite your best intentions and… Read more on Cisco Blogs

​

How you set your factory network up can make or break your Industry 4.0 initiatives. This fact is probably underappreciated, but if the network is not optimized, despite your best intentions and large investments in creating digital twins, building analytical cloud applications, or virtualizing your control systems, you may not achieve the outcomes you desire. Let Cisco manufacturing experts help you get a handle on what it takes and join us in a panel discussion. Register here.

What it takes

Optimizing your factory network goes beyond simply selecting the best industrial networking equipment. Of course, the choice of networking equipment is essential, but it’s only a starting point, and you also must consider the often-neglected aspects and hidden gotchas that may hinder your ability to get the most out of the network.

For example, while good networking equipment will enable seamless connectivity and integration of various industrial devices and systems, you must consider how well it can facilitate collection of real-time data for analysis, provide visibility to connected industrial assets and traffic flows, and facilitate advanced services such as secure remote access.

Well-designed industrial networks are scalable and flexible to accommodate the evolving needs of industrial environments. They can support the addition of new devices, equipment, and systems without disrupting operations. They also ensure high performance for deterministic operations as well as reliability and resiliency to minimize downtime.

Industrial networks must also assess security vulnerabilities as well as provide granular visibility into connected assets and traffic flows. This insight can help define segmentation policies to limit the movement of threats – policies that the network can enforce. The network can also continuously monitor these assets for any abnormal behavior that might indicate presence of malware, which can be quickly identified and removed. Moreover, capable networking equipment can accomplish all this without additional servers.

Modern industrial networks provide advanced services such as remote monitoring and maintenance, especially useful for large or distributed operations that can avoid the need for physical access to each machine, increasing flexibility and reducing costs.

Let Cisco manufacturing experts sort it out for you

Can an industrial network really do all this? If it all sounds confusing, or too good to be true, and you have more questions than answers, be sure to join Cisco experts in an interactive webinar on Tuesday, September 26, 2023, at 8AM PT/11 AM ET/5PM CET, where you can seek details and clarifications from specialists who bring their experiences from working with manufacturers just like yourselves. This webinar will be led by:

Paul Didier, Senior Manufacturing Solutions Leader
Carlos Rojas, Global Manufacturing Solutions Leader
David Gutshall, Industrial IoT Manufacturing Sales Leader
Erika Franco, Industrial IoT Technical Solutions Leader

Bring your questions and be sure to register. Unable to make it? No worries, a recording will be made available for your review after the event. Register for Modernize your factory network for smart manufacturing today and put Cisco manufacturing experts to work for you!

Meanwhile, check out Cisco Industrial IoT networking and Cisco industrial security pages, and read the  IT/OT Convergence in Critical Infrastructure and Industrials White Paper.

  It is commonly understood that a scalable, resilient, secure, and deterministic network is essential for Industry 4.0. How does your factory measure up? Join our manufacturing experts as they discuss the practical steps you can take to modernize your network for Industry 4.0 and beyond.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Businesses are expected to deliver flawless, secure digital experiences to their customers through applications. However, the modern application era has led to an explosion of security risks as… Read more on Cisco Blogs

​

Businesses are expected to deliver flawless, secure digital experiences to their customers through applications. However, the modern application era has led to an explosion of security risks as distributed applications are built in complex environments that create large attack surfaces — leaving businesses vulnerable to bad actors. Ninety-two percent (92%) of global technologists admit that the rush to rapidly innovate and respond to the changing needs of customers has come at the expense of robust application security during software development. According to RedHat, 93% of companies had a Kubernetes security incident in the last 12 months, and on average, it takes 277 days to identify and contain a data breach.

Application security is foundational to a brand’s trust and loyalty, but vulnerabilities can occur anytime, anywhere, making it difficult and time-consuming to prioritize responses. To avoid costly delays that can result in damage to revenue and brand reputation, organizations must have clear visibility of each new vulnerability and the insights to prioritize remediation based on their business impact. According to a survey conducted by Cisco, 93% of IT professionals believe it’s important to be able to contextualize security and correlate risk in relation to key areas such as the application, user and business, and in doing so, prioritize vulnerability fixes based on potential business impact.

Prioritize and remediate security issues based on business impact

Business risk observability is an industry-first evolution in application security that prioritizes security issues based on potential impact, allowing teams to rapidly map vulnerabilities and take action where it matters most. By combining the threat context from Cisco security products to understand the likelihood of exploits with the ability to map vulnerabilities and attacks to understand the location and impact of threats, Cisco can uniquely provide organizations with a transaction-based business risk score. This score gives organizations the critical information they need to not only understand where they can reduce their overall organizational risk profile, but also understand when, where, and how to take action to mitigate vulnerabilities that could potentially impact revenue and reputation.

Business Risk Score from Cisco Secure Application

Cisco Secure Application for cloud environments

To help organizations more effectively secure cloud native applications based on business risk, Cisco is introducing Cisco Secure Application on the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform. Now, teams have access to business risk observability across both hybrid and cloud environments, helping them to rapidly assess risk, prioritize action, and remediate security issues based on potential impact. Cisco Secure Application works seamlessly with Cloud Native Application Observability to deliver this functionality.

With Cisco Secure Application, IT professionals can:

Locate and highlight security issues across application entities (business transactions, services, workload, pods, containers) so they can be quickly isolated.
Prioritize issues with a business risk score that combines application and business impact context with vulnerability detection and security intelligence from Cisco security products to easily identify which business transactions have the greatest risk.
Accelerate response times with real-time remediation guidance with recommended prescriptive actions to prioritize and address the most impactful vulnerabilities.

Protect what matters with Cisco Secure Application

Cisco Secure Application helps organizations bring applications and security teams together to secure development and deployments of modern applications. Teams have expanded visibility and intelligent insights into business risks to better prioritize and respond in real-time to potential revenue-impacting security events and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

Take a deeper dive into observing business risk in cloud native environments
Learn more about Cisco Secure Application
Learn more about Cisco FSO
Learn more about Cisco FSO Platform

  As the application security threat landscape grows, it's more difficult to find and prioritize vulnerabilities for remediation. Cisco Secure Application can help protect what matters most with business risk observability.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

The Transformational Tech series highlights Cisco’s grant recipients that use technology to help transform the lives of individuals and communities. This blog features Cisco’s partnership with F… Read more on Cisco Blogs

​

The Transformational Tech series highlights Cisco’s grant recipients that use technology to help transform the lives of individuals and communities. This blog features Cisco’s partnership with Fairfood, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in the Netherlands. If you are interested in a deep dive on this partnership, please contact Sue-Lynn Hinson.

New research by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization shows that the world’s nearly 500 million smallholder farmers produce around one third of the world’s food supply. Yet many of them live on less than USD $2 per day and can barely feed and sustain their own families. Fair and ethical business practices are a rising concern among consumers; yet many agri-food companies struggle to build brand trust and prove that they are operating sustainably, treating farmers and food workers ethically and paying them a living income.

Fairfood has developed a blockchain-based technology platform called Trace with support from Cisco. Trace enables full transparency across the food supply chain, and provides data, evidence, and insights with which companies can develop programs and strategies to implement ethical business practices and improve the lives and livelihoods of smallholder farmers and food workers.

“The relationship between the buyer and the producer, to me, is the most important. It is
good to have this transparency inside the cooperative; to be able to show what we are
doing with the coffee, every step of the process. It helps build strong and dependable
relationships with buyers.”—José Francisco Villada (Panchito), Coffee producer and co-founder of Capucas

Fairfood’s mission is to accelerate change towards fair and sustainable food value chains, partnering with agri-food companies to develop innovative business models that benefit companies and cooperatives and enable fair value distribution models that lead to higher incomes for smallholder farmers. Currently connecting more than 300,000 farmers and their family members to the domestic and international supply chains that shape their future, Fairfood’s global operations span 17 countries and diverse commodities related to the cocoa, coffee, spice, horticultural and fruit industries.

Peter van der Linde, Fairfood’s partnership director

Fairfood’s partnership director, Peter van der Linde, shares the non-profit’s technology evolution and how its partnership with Cisco has helped it make significant advancements in digital inclusion while protecting data privacy and security and giving smallholder farmers control over their own digital information.

What role does technology play in Fairfood’s mission?

Bag of beans with QR code

Technology and digital inclusion are key. Having technology that can help securely trace the product from farmer to consumer, end to end, is invaluable to bringing positive change to fair and ethical food sustainability, building brand trust among consumers through supply chain transparency, and helping us scale to market. Getting everyone on board, from the farmers to the cooperatives, to the brands, retailers, and consumers, is vital to creating real change.

Fairfood adopts a partnership value chain approach to traceability, forming data partnerships along international food corridors that benefit all parties, with a strong focus on strengthening the position of farmers as a key part of sustainability strategies. Fairfood’s approach is unique because it is focused on system change and centered on both product traceability and publicly verifiable brand promises that can be linked to individual products that add tangible value in the commercial market and help to build consumer trust. And the technical infrastructure that is backed by the partnership with Cisco is essential.

How has the support of Cisco contributed to Fairfood’s technology development and how critical has this been in advancing your strategy?

With the support of Cisco, Fairfood has strengthened its farmer-centric traceability solution that currently allows 46 companies to show exactly where products come from and share evidence for brand promises publicly, while improving farmers’ incomes. The partnership also allowed us to develop a data-secure NFC (Near Field Communication) card system in combination with a mobile app for first buyers, that enables the development of financial track records for farmers and community members who do not have a phone or a bank account. It is used to securely digitize proof of cash payments offline, ensuring financial transactions can only be verified by the authorized users.

Trace app in action

In the markets Fairfood operates in, this concept shifts the power back to farmers and community members, allowing them to verify that payments intended for them are received, while ensuring they remain in control of their own data. It also opens up the possibility to use these records for financial inclusion for farmers that do not have a bank account. “We are exploring ways in which these digital financial track records can be used for credit scoring to help secure basic loans for these farmers that were previously out of scope. It’s a massive opportunity with a lot of potential and benefit to both the unbanked farmers and financial institutions”.

What are some of Fairfood’s accomplishments/wins in the industry to date?

Nutmeg with QR code that will soon be brought to European market

Fairfood has a goal to improve the livelihoods of one million people by 2025. One of the ways we are making strides to achieve this goal is through novel business models. In 2022, Fairfood implemented its farmer-centric traceability solution with Verstegen Spices in their nutmeg supply chain from Indonesia, with a new incentive structure wherein farmers are paid a premium for top-quality product, and additionally compensated for providing digital verification of payments received. The program had two pathways of change: one aimed at demonstrating the business case for fully traceable nutmeg products, and the other focused on showcasing the potential of incentives to help structurally increase payments to farmers. The case got highlighted in the report ‘Towards a New Paradigm’ commissioned by USAID (DDI) and the Gates Foundation.

Watch a short video about the program.

The report highlights that after the initial hybrid financing model (public-private), key parties in the value chain are willing to continue to cover the running costs of the app/card system and sustain payments for both quality and data premiums. Farmer verified transaction records show that the quality and data premiums continued to result in an approximately $100 increase in income per farmer per year during the first year after implementation (March 2022 – March 2023).

Learn how Trace is enabling full transparency for the supply chain.

What challenges/roadblocks does Fairfood still face?

Farmer checks quality of their product

One of the biggest challenges Fairfood faces is to prove the business case for fully traceable products, instead of the market depending on current sustainability labels. We know that some of these labels can be misleading, and many do not prove that farmers are being paid fairly (despite consumers thinking that is what these labels mean). So, bringing our farmer-centric traceability system and approaches to the forefront is key to making real change towards sustainable and ethical food supply chains, consumer awareness, and brand trust. It takes time for people to really understand the power of farm-to-fork traceability, but we are beginning to make inroads.

Another challenge is with legislation. Up until a few years ago, there was a lack of legislation around ethical and sustainable supply chains. We are now seeing positive change in this area across governments in several countries and this is helping us to pick up steam in companies where sustainability was not previously mission-critical to them. A final roadblock area is the lack of data, and this is where we are partnering with our cooperatives to help them to digitize paper-based processes, for example enhancing their farmer lists and by supporting them with means to digitize transaction records using our app and card system. Sometimes it is starting from scratch, but as we collect data through the Trace platform, we can facilitate real change throughout the supply chain and help to make sure that farmers are paid fairly for their products.

How can consumers help Fairfood’s mission?

There are multiple ways consumers can help with Fairfood’s mission towards a sustainable food system.

Education: Learn about what companies are supporting ethical and sustainable food practices. Being an informed, responsible consumer can help to influence the system as a whole and lead to real, actionable change. Visit the Fairfood website for more information.
Enjoy coding? Get involved: For the tech-savvy, one way to get involved is to possibly help Fairfood through open-source software contributions. Reach out to Derek at, derek@fairfood.org for more details on how you can contribute on Trace mobile.
Connect Fairfood to future partnerships: Know of any local companies interested in bringing fully traceable products to consumers? Reach out to Peter at, peter@fairfood.org.

  Fairfood has developed a blockchain-based technology platform called Trace with support from Cisco. Trace provides full transparency across the food supply chain, enabling ethical business practices that improve the lives of small farmerholders and food workers.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

​

Who is ACW and what do they do?

ACW, a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest technology manufacturers and services companies, faces a pressing challenge – a shortage of skilled workers on a global scale. This conglomerate, boasting hundreds of manufacturing clients worldwide, seeked to address this issue by introducing their innovative ACW Eagle Remote Worker & Out-of-Band Management Solution, geared towards enhancing equipment accessibility and security. In short, ACW’s mission is to provide a seamless solution, enabling better accessibility, easy deployment, and efficient management integration.

In the backdrop of a changing work landscape marked by hybrid work models and increasing staff turnover, manufacturing organizations have recognized the urgency of real-time virtual knowledge sharing. ACW’s Remote Worker, built on Cisco and Moderro’s collaboration technology, is designed to bridge this knowledge gap. Moderro’s knowledge delivery system introduces a new dimension of real-time video calling and virtual collaboration for both experts and end users.

This technology promises several advantages:

Improved Collaboration: Manufacturers can now swiftly connect with vendors and technical experts worldwide, fostering efficient communication.
Zero Downtime through Enhanced Efficiency: Manufacturing customers receive timely support, improving project turnaround times by promptly accessing remote expertise.
Remote and Hybrid Manufacturing Work: The solution enables secure remote and hybrid work environments for manufacturers, with Cisco’s secure communication solutions ensuring data safety.

The Remote Worker solution positions ACW ahead of its competitors, promising superior service for its clients.

ACW Pilot

The ACW Remote Worker solution underwent a successful pilot deployment on the manufacturing floor of ACW’s partner in Taiwan. This involved equipping CN machine lines with tablets accessible to operators. When issues arise, operators can initiate a video call with an expert, who can assess the problem, control tablet cameras, share screens, send text messages, and offer image hints. This streamlines the process, reducing problem resolution time from potentially hours to mere minutes.

Mr. Huang, Production Line Manager, emphasizes the efficiency and timeliness of this solution. He highlights the contrast between the traditional method of contacting engineers through emails or phone calls and the immediate video interaction provided by ACW’s Remote Worker. Additionally, features like document and photo sharing enhance communication between operators and engineers.

ACW plans to leverage this solution to support its parent company’s manufacturing plants and service-based clients, anticipating that it will facilitate global collaboration among manufacturing experts.

The Future for ACW

In the future, ACW aims to integrate its Remote Worker solution with a Hybrid Work Software Suite. This approach promises rapid and efficient replication in various manufacturing settings, presenting an attractive proposition for companies seeking to stay competitive globally. Leveraging a diverse Cisco product portfolio, ACW can expand the solution to incorporate seven Cisco software solutions, including Webex, Umbrella, DUO, Thousand Eyes End Point Agent, Secure End Point Advantage, AnyConnect, and Meraki System Manager.

This comprehensive suite empowers companies to secure, connect, and collaborate effectively, enabling manufacturers to harness the potential of their existing systems while benefiting from remote expertise, revolutionizing project collaboration in the manufacturing industry.

Please visit our Portfolio Explorer for Manufacturing

Additional Resources

Moderro Remote Expert Solution

ACW

Moderro Remote Expert Solution on the DevNet

  ACW, a subsidiary of a global technology giant, confronts a worldwide skilled labor shortage. They've introduced the ACW Eagle Remote Worker Solution to enhance Equipment Accessibility & Security, striving for seamless accessibility and efficient management.  Read More Cisco Blogs