Solving the IT/OT Disconnect Problem
Decentralize Data. Unify Insight.
A Distributed Approach to IT/OT Integration
The disconnect between IT and OT systems is one of the most persistent barriers to scalable digital transformation in manufacturing. Plant-floor data is rich, real-time, and critical — but it’s often locked inside SCADA systems, PLCs, or local databases. Meanwhile, enterprise IT teams are expected to deliver analytics, reporting, and strategic insight, often without access to reliable or timely operational data.
The traditional approach relies on centralized architectures, custom integrations, or heavy middleware layers — all of which are brittle, expensive, and slow to adapt.
It also creates bottlenecks: every data request must pass through a handful of centralized teams, delaying insight and creating friction between IT and OT.
MIStudio and MIX offer a different approach — one that’s distributed, modular, and aligned with emerging data mesh principles. Instead of forcing all data through a central pipeline, MIStudio allows OT teams to create lightweight, domain-owned solutions that expose structured, shareable data to the rest of the organization.
With MIStudio, controls engineers and manufacturing teams can:
- Build dashboards and views tailored for operators, supervisors, or remote IT users
- Structure and transform OT data where it's created, not upstream
- Tag and publish data using open standards like OPC UA, MQTT, SQL, and REST
- Avoid fragile one-off integrations or vendor lock-in
These solutions are created with simple scripting or no coding at all, enabling process experts and OT engineers to contribute directly — no software development team required. This aligns with a core data mesh concept: empower the people closest to the data to manage and publish it as a product.
Once deployed, MIX — the IIoT runtime — runs these dashboards and data pipelines continuously, either on the plant floor, at the edge, or in the cloud. MIX ensures that data products are available to IT systems, analytics tools, or enterprise platforms without compromising security or performance.
This distributed approach to IT/OT integration offers major advantages:
- Decentralization: Data remains close to its source, owned and maintained by the teams who understand it
- Interoperability: Standard interfaces make it easy to share and consume data across domains
- Scalability: You can start small and expand naturally, without redesigning your entire architecture
- Resilience: Eliminates single points of failure and fragile handoffs between IT and OT teams
By enabling OT teams to publish usable, governed data — and allowing IT teams to consume it securely and consistently — MIStudio and MIX help you bridge the gap between domains without creating new silos or overhead. This is what a practical, real-world step toward data mesh in manufacturing looks like.
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- info@ergotech.com