Telstra Industrial Automation

Safer mine sites.

Predictive supply chains.

Simpler environmental management.

Smarter construction.

The rewards of industrial automation are high. But the reality is complex.

It takes expert skills and the right technology to deliver automation that adds real value.

Simplifying this challenge, Telstra brings you solutions across the automation ecosystem.

Telstra Purple specialists assess your IT and OT environments and business goals, providing professional guidance throughout your journey.

We combine local industry experience with global expertise to plan and connect sensors, help ensure your network is fit for purpose, and integrate Information and Operational Technology – all within a cyber resilient environment. 

Our data professionals combine data from industrial assets, systems and sensors to create an automation control solution that you can optimise using powerful analytics. 

We then evolve predictive maintenance and responsive production capabilities to deliver transparent operations and transform business. 

It’s how we’re helping keep drivers safer 

Enabling autonomous haulage trucks 

Driving efficiencies in industrial processing

And speeding up construction.

So if you’re ready to automate anything from a business process to a supply chain, talk to Telstra.

All systems go. Telstra industrial automation.

Find out more at telstra.com.au/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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

[text on screen: All systems go. Telstra industrial automation

Find out more at telstra.com.au/industrial-automation] 

[title: The convergence of IT and OT]

Matt Griffiths, Managing Director, Alliance Automation, A Telstra Purple Company: IT/OT has become a priority for a lot of our customers to help them run their businesses more effectively through applications such as machine learning, AI, predictive analytics. It allows businesses to become smarter down on the plant floor, to allow them to actually automate their process and their operations, make things autonomous, make things smarter.

Mining customers, oil and gas customers, anyone that creates some sort of reliability process around their equipment and asset, they could all benefit from industrial automation.

Warren Jennings, Industry CTO, Telstra: IT/OT integration really needs that holistic, multifaceted strategy. But that has to be accompanied by a highly pragmatic road map.

Matt Griffiths: One thing that you really need to get right is understanding your operational technology, asset, and what it actually is. And its currency in technology today. Also then planning to upgrade to bring it into currency, is also a quite lengthy process, but there is systems and processes and tool that we have to allow that to happen.

Warren Jennings: I'd also advise organisations, don't underestimate the technical challenges involved, but also realise the non-technical challenges involved.

How do you bring your IT and OT teams together so that they can create, and follow, a consistent framework across the organisation?

We've acquired an organisation called Alliance Automation, who are one of the foremost organisations in Australia with a very large skill base in IT/OT convergence, whether it's digital control systems, engineering, all the way through to operational technology security.

Matt Griffiths: Our strengths are from ground roots industrial 4.0 through to high-end analytics and integration at the level 4 or ERP enhanced level. We cover a full end-to-end process, allowing us to build out solutions from start to finish.

Alliance Automation is vendor agnostic. At the end of the day, it's not one box fits all and we find that the best place to start is really scoping out that digital roadmap, so that you understand what utopia is.

Warren Jennings: Find a partner who, yes, can help you with that strategic vision, but can also work to understand your business priority and build and execute that pragmatic road map that at the end of the day is going to deliver the benefits.

Matt Griffiths: You need a strong partner and you need to start with a digital road map assessment, understand the risks, the mitigations for the risks, the remediation plans, bringing it into its currency and then being able to manage it.

And that's where we come in because we can provide that full lifecycle, as can Telstra, in supporting the customer’s infrastructure.

There's not a lot you can't do with industrial automation. We can enable every business to optimise and become more productive and safer.

[text on screen: All systems go. Telstra industrial automation

Find out more at telstra.com.au/industrial-automation] 

[Title: Securing IT/OT environments]

Matt Griffiths, Managing Director, Alliance Automation, A Telstra Purple Company: Any company wanting to do IT/OT integration will need to be cyber resilient.

Warren Jennings, Industry CTO, Telstra: Increases in cyberattack, geopolitical tensions, regulation, and the drive to have much more secure and stable supply chains has really accelerated that.

Matt Griffiths: 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.

Warren Jennings: 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.

Matt Griffiths: 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.

Warren Jennings: 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.

Matt Griffiths: 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.

Warren Jennings: 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.

Matt Griffiths: 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.

[text on screen: Telstra Secuirty Operations Centre]

Warren Jennings: 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.

[text on screen: All systems go. Telstra industrial automation

Find out more at telstra.com.au/industrial-automation] 

[title: Creating a data-driven business]

Warren Jennings, Industry CTO, Telstra: Industrial automation and data analytics are really tightly interrelated. First of all, data and analytics are one of the key tools to getting your processes right before you implement automation. Secondly, it's data and analytics that can drive new sources of efficiency and productivity.

Gideon Ratner, Chief Customer Officer, Quantium Telstra: In the supply chain area, data and analytics can drive a number of very important business decisions. For example, improved accuracy can help a business drive better labour planning, help reduce wastage and allocate resources in a much more accurate and predictable way around the demand and supply of the business.

Warren Jennings: Understanding where to start can be really complex. Organisations are awash with data and have any number of processes where they could apply analytics.

Gideon Ratner: Be clear on what problem are you looking to solve. This means identifying where the key high priority areas within the business where data analytics can be applied.

Warren Jennings: To create a data-driven business isn't a point-in-time exercise, it's actually a journey. So first, make a start. Find a few discrete initiatives.

Gideon Ratner: Get the foundations right. Very often this step gets missed. It's less exciting, but actually having sound data quality is very important to really drive actionable results.

Warren Jennings: Map out those processes and identify the critical decision points along the way. Then for each of those critical decision points, look at the data and how you use that data to make the decisions.

Gideon Ratner: You will learn a lot from attacking a real problem, learning from that, developing the expertise and growing the impact that you have on the business. This involves getting the right skillset, having the technical domain, having the right technology and toolsets to achieve this.

Warren Jennings: As Telstra's looked into what we need in order to support Australian industries, we've realised that deep data and analytics capability is in short supply in Australia. So we've created a joint venture with an organisation named Quantium who are quite possibly Australia's largest single pool of data science and data engineering expertise with really strong focus on solving enterprise problems.

Gideon Ratner: Quantium brings over a thousand specialists, data scientists and engineers, coupled with years of IP to really solve large, impactful business problems. This means that with the power of both Quantium and the Telstra ecosystem, we can really bring the best to the industrial sector.

[text on screen: All systems go. Telstra industrial automation

Find out more at telstra.com.au/industrial-automation]