Micetro for Industry 4.0

IT and OT Teams in Manufacturing industries face some unique challenges when compared to other industries. Likely a lot of this is due to the fact that they have both IT and OT teams, who have traditionally worked very separately. However, with the dawn of Industry 4.0, or what some are calling the 4th Industrial Revolution, the lines are blurring between these two teams.

IT/OT Convergence

In a Gartner article written in 2017, Christy Pettey wrote:

“ Gartner predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of OT service providers will create key partnerships with IT-centric providers for IoT offerings.”

What's been the main driver behind this? Likely the expectations of both teams from an operational experience perspective, as well as keeping up with the competition from a customer experience perspective. People, in general, have gotten used to getting the information and services they want, when they want it, in an intuitive way. As a brief real world example, asset tracking has become an integral part of life at a warehouse. Whether robots or real people are working in these warehouses, they need to know exactly where items are located. By attaching asset tags which can ping Access Points, indoor location services can accurately locate an item down to the exact shelf in an aisle. This all to make things like shipping out to the customer faster, which may even directly affect revenue.

From an OT perspective, this kind of orchestration can be very difficult, because they're often working with legacy hardware which can't be End of Lifed. This is where IoT becomes very important. While we can't End of Life these legacy hardware systems, nor can we actually modernize them to create better processes and workflows, there is a stopgap measure of using IoT or smart devices to modernize legacy systems.

Now, with the proliferation of IoT devices comes a whole new set of problems, though.

• How do IT teams track and manage assets?
• How are we making sure documentation is accurate and who is contributing to the documentation from each team?
• How can we use the same systems to gain full observability from the production floor to the data center and beyond to the public cloud?

What does this have to do with DNS, DHCP, and IPAM?

DNS, DHCP, and IP are all referred to as "common services." Literally, if a device is connected to a network, it's likely using at least two if not all three of these protocols. This means that if you know what's going on with these common services, you have a pretty good view in general of what's going on in your network.

Being able to get centralized and contextualized information on all your devices, including what IPs are being used, DNS zones and records, DHCP scopes, as well as built-in documentation for all your devices will make troubleshooting easier, implementation faster, and operations between teams and skillsets frictionless.

Micetro, by Men&Mice, is an overlay DDI (DNS, DHCP, and IPAM) solution which will work with all of your devices on-premises in the datacenter, in the warehouse, or in the cloud.

With Micetro you can:

• Provide control and visibility for your entire DDI environment from one GUI or API
• Go beyond simple Active Directory Users & Groups integration, to multiple Microsoft integration points
• Work with open source solutions easily
• Centralize audit trail and server logs
• Gain built-in documentation for compliance and reporting

Give it a Try

Micetro is a non-disruptive software which you can install on-premises in a matter of less than a half hour. Just download the free trial and use our modular Deployment Playlist to get started! Non-disruptive means you don't have to change anything about your current environment for Micetro to work. You just need to upload your IPAM info, and connect to your current DNS and DHCP services.

You'll gain visibility into your entire environment immediately.