Telstra Industrial Automation

[Warren Jennings, Industry CTO, Telstra] For several years, Telstra's been staring really deeply into understanding the capabilities that we're going to need to support our customers as industrial automation accelerates throughout the Australian economy. One of the most obvious areas of that investment is in foundational technologies like 5G and some of our data platforms. So we've literally invested billions of dollars in making sure that that technology foundation is available to Australia and Australian enterprises.

[Alan Seery, Managing Director, Aqura] For the first time ever now we've seen a technology that is capable of fulfilling all the demands of enterprise. 

[Warren Jennings, Industry CTO, Telstra] 5G also has the ability to provide very low latency, which is really important in applications involving things like remote control or augmented reality, where humans are very sensitive to things like latency. 

Another key feature of 5G has to do with what we call device density 5G has been designed to be able to cope with millions of devices in a coverage zone. 

In a lot of industrial use cases. You have applications that have very tight constraints on the network. 5G gives you the ability to allocate network resources, separate them and guarantee them for those applications.

[Alan Seery, Managing Director, Aqura] From small sensors that are just sending tiny packets of data once an hour or once a day all the way through to those other high demand applications that will cover all of that in one network.

Private 5G provides you with the control over the network complete enter and control. You can set the priority and the quality of service for all of your applications. 

[Warren Jennings, Industry CTO, Telstra] The design, the implementation and the running of those industrial networks is absolutely critical. We've acquired an organization named Aqura, who are one of Australia's foremost organizations with deep experience across a range of industries on designing, building and running industrial networks.

[Alan Seery, Managing Director, Aqura] And with the combination of Telstra, we are able to bring together a full ecosystem that covers everything from private to public, and we can satisfy all the use cases that our clients need with everything in between. 

[Warren Jennings, Industry CTO, Telstra] One of the other capabilities that is in really short supply in Australia is around the convergence of operational technology and information technology.

How they work together securely is very fundamental. We've acquired an organization called Alliance Automation, who is one of the foremost organizations in Australia with a very large skill base in the skills that are necessary for that sort of IT convergence. The pointy end of industrial automation, whether it's physical or information automation, is the ability to take all of that digitised data coming out of the automation and to create actionable insights from it.

[Warren Jennings, Industry CTO, Telstra] So we've created joint venture with an organization named Quantum who are quite possibly Australia's largest single pool of data science and data engineering expertise, with really strong focus on solving enterprise problems. The real glue that enables you to bring those together is an organization called Telstra Purple. We have over 2000 highly skilled and deeply experienced professionals in managed services and in professional services that really help tie all aspects of industrial automation programs together.

[Alan Seery, Managing Director, Aqura] We're now in an era of the art of what's possible. Your imagination is the constraint. You can, within reason, deploy technology to satisfy any use cases that you might have. I think it's there today. We just need to work together to make it happen.

All systems go. Telstra industrial automation.

Any company wanting to do IT/OT integration will need to be cyber resilient.

Increases in cyberattack, geopolitical tensions, regulation, and the drive to have much more secure

and stable supply chains has really accelerated that.

Because we don't have an air gap anymore and we're connecting networks, applications, systems, processes

from external connectivity all the way to the plant floor.

Securing industrial automation can be a really complex task. Often even within a single organisation you need to bring together

different frameworks, different parts of the organisation, lots of different technologies.

Also, it's important to understand that the boundaries of your organisation aren't the boundaries of your risk.

Quite often you'll have IoT equipment that may be widely dispersed, but also you're reliant

on your trading partners.

You need a cybersecurity strategy, including how you manage your risk, how you treat the risk,

and how you operate in that risk-adverse environment.

Deep shortages in cybersecurity expertise nationally make it more challenging. If you don't have the comprehensive set

of cybersecurity skills in-house, the right partner can help you understand

where your vulnerabilities are, can help you prioritise how you respond to them and can help you with the execution

of that program of work, making your organisation secure, end-to-end.

The methodology in which you manage the risk is different from an IT environment, so, we can't just shut down a gas plant

or a power plant because the operational impact is far worse than the actual attack itself.

The next step is to understand what can be done around the threats and the vulnerabilities that you have in your system, and then develop out and design a remediation process to actually plug those holes

and knock off those threats and then how do you manage that.

Actively work on your security culture, train your people, shift your mindset to considering security

as a key priority. Conduct regular audits and get an independent perspective on your security posture,

your technologies and your processes.

It is a big job and it requires experts that understand the risk and that are also certified

to actually help you understand what the risks are and how they comply with standards today.

One of the things we do is do security by design throughout our design process

for all projects.

One of the smartest things you could do is get us and Telstra Purple in to help understand your cybersecurity risk

in your IT/OT domain, and then introduce a secure operations centre that is provided by Telstra to help

also manage your IT, then in your OT domain as well.

And finally, no organisation is an island, so I encourage organisations to work collaboratively with their trading partners, with their vendors, to uplift everyone's cybersecurity capability.