POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES

REACTION PAPER

Opening CoRES 2020 was the first seminar with the topic “Hacking into
the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The guest speakers were Engr. Arvin Roi
Macaraeg— a licensed Electronic Engineer, an ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT
Service Management holder, and currently working with Trend Micro’s Threat
Analysis team and Engr. John Donnie Celestre— Core Technology Engineer
from Trend Micro, an ECE Board Topnotcher (4th place), and is currently taking
up MS Electronics Engineering at the Ateneo de Manila University Graduate
School.
Digital disruption is transforming businesses and industries like never
before, with 40% of incumbent businesses expected to be displaced by 2020,
according to Cisco and IMD. The fourth industrial revolution –involving the
hyper-connected world of people; processes; data, and things – is set to create
unprecedented value for business, individuals and industries at large. For
manufacturers, the ability to move certain operations to the cloud, as well as
the growth of the internet of things (IoT), has started to create substantial
efficiencies and cost savings across the entire value chain. We project that
$383bn of the total industry opportunity will come from connected products
and machines, and new service models over the coming decade. Manufacturers
have already started embracing digitization to improve efficiencies, with new
applications such as machine as-a-service; predictive maintenance; quality
control; plant efficiency, and customer engagement, helping to significantly
improve operational costs, production uptime and overall productivity. Cisco’s
latest survey reveals that since using predictive maintenance, 87% of senior
manufacturing decision makers in more than 13 countries saw a positive
impact on overall equipment effectiveness.
 POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES

Digital Disruption

Yet, digital disruption in the manufacturing sector is going well beyond

predictive maintenance. Industrial robot manufacturer, FANUC, used to ship
robots, but had no feedback about usage unless there was a problem and
M
resulting downtime. R
Thanks to a new highly secure hybrid cloud, extending its existing data O
centre to customers’ premises, the company can now extract data from its M
robots and connect them to people, processes and things, in order to better
assess performance, and predict an issue rather than simply reacting after the
fact.
The benefits of the connected factory, therefore, are undeniable. Yet the
exponential growth of digital connections also brings inherent security risks.
Cisco predicts that by 2020 there will be more than 50 billion devices
connected to the internet, and as the network expands and the volume of data
traversing it increases dramatically, it’s inevitable that cyber risk will also grow.
As we have seen in the nature and frequency of high-profile hacks of late,
cybercrime is a serious business risk to all types of organizations.
Adversaries are as sophisticated and persistent as ever, finding new and
intelligent ways to compromise systems, while evading detection. In fact, Cisco
research reveals that on average, 60% of data is stolen within the first few
hours of an attack, yet 50% of attacks manage to persist for months, if not
years, without detection.
Prioritizing security capabilities is not only important for protecting
manufacturers and their customers’ data, assets and reputation, but is
fundamental to successful digital transformation.