A profound transformation is underway in manufacturing, as workflows are further automated and management processes are digitized. With increasing global material constraints and regulations geared towards sustainable production, manufacturers leverage the cloud’s security and scale to drive innovations as they adapt their processes toward the expected future paradigm.
Apply Insights from Digital Twins
With intricate production processes, from sourcing materials and factory assembly to even incorporating and configuring software components, it’s no surprise that many manufacturers are adopting digital twins. With so many impactful use cases, the manufacturing sector represents over 30% of the 2022 global digital twin market share.1 Azure Digital Twins empower manufacturers to create comprehensive models of physical environments and interactions between people, components, robots, devices, and more that produce actionable insights to drive strategies and improve processes.
Loaded with proprietary information, stringent access control to digital twins is essential for safeguarding manufacturing trade secrets. F5 BIG-IP APM’s Identity Aware Proxy (IAP) with Azure AD Conditional Access enables fine-grained, adaptable, zero-trust access to Azure Digital Twins. By alleviating access complexity, F5 can help accelerate the creation and utilization of Azure Digital Twins that help optimize production capabilities and efficiencies.
Optimize Supply Chains
With around 30,000 parts in an average car2 and the average smartphone containing over 80% of the periodic table’s stable elements,3 manufacturers depend upon numerous and sometimes elaborate supply chains to source materials for production. Add in all the components and interconnected applications and systems required to execute the production process, and manufacturers operate supply chains with razor-thin margins of error.
Manufacturers can incorporate Azure solutions into their supply chain operations to gain visibility into material management and increase holistic supply chain efficiency. For instance, manufacturers can use Azure IoT to connect supply chain operations to the cloud and Azure AI to simulate scenarios and generate prescriptive recommendations to improve supply chain resiliency. F5 NGINXaaS for Azure optimizes the performance of the various multi-cloud and hybrid applications necessary to successfully manage today’s complex supply chains.
Protect Production Processes
With myriad avenues to infiltrate, from barcode scanners to software-dependent heavy machinery, and a zero tolerance for downtime, manufacturers are a prime target for cybercriminals. Manufacturers were the number one target of ransomware extortion attacks in 2022, accounting for 30% of the total.4 It’s estimated that ransomware attacks cost manufacturing and utility companies over $5.53 billion in downtime in 2022.5
With today’s sophisticated and evolving threats, manufacturers can heighten the security of any Azure applications involved in their production process. Integrated with Azure Security Center, F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) enables manufacturers to secure and operate Azure applications across clouds with high-performance routers, load balancers, firewalls, and API security.
Secure and Optimize Azure with F5 Solutions
F5 provides manufacturing firms with industry-leading security and performance solutions for all the mission-critical Azure applications and services they use throughout their expansive production processes and business operations. F5 helps ensure that manufacturers derive expectational value from their Azure investments, empowering product innovation, supply chain resiliency, and ransomware protection.
Available in the Azure Marketplace, F5 solutions are easy to procure, install, operate, and manage. F5 delivers faster time to value with flexible consumption models so that manufacturers can build and operate confidently.
To learn more about BIG-IP APM, visit: https://www.f5.com/products/big-ip-services/access-policy-manager
Sources:
1 Global Data, Digital Twin Market Size, Share, Trends and Analysis, January 2023
2 NAPA Auto Parts, How Many Parts Are in a Car?, July 2021
3 World Economic Forum, This Graphic Shows What Your Smartphone Is Made Of, August 2021
4 IBM, Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2023, February 2023
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