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The month of March ushers in warmer temperature as Spring weather begins to emerge. College basketball season kicks into high gear with March Madness and St. Patrick’s day turns everyone Irish for a day. The month of March also brings the Cisco Connect events to the Midwest and this year include a unique addition – Manufacturing Technical Workshops in the cities of Cleveland (March 12), Milwaukee (April 10) and Detroit (May 15).

These free workshops will focus on real-world applications and best practices for manufacturing with a focus on how to improve operations, drive innovation and reduce risk.

Topics for the one-day workshops include:

  • Industrial Network Architecture
  • Industrial Wireless
  • ICS Security
  • Network Management
  • IT/OT Convergence, Industry Standards and Trends

The agenda is built to help educate on the changing landscape of smart manufacturing/Industry 4.0. Attendees will learn fundamental technology integration points as well as areas they can drive process improvements and modernization in their organizations. This event is designed for you if you are an operations professional working in automation and control, an industrial network designer, an embedded IT person in charge of supporting manufacturing or a system integrator. You will have the opportunity to experience solution architectures first-hand while also networking with your industry peers.

Here’s the agenda for the technical workshops:

  • Connected Factory Architecture & Use Cases – Pt 1. And Pt 2.: Cisco’s Connected Factory, industrial companies can build one common, converged, and rugged plant-to-business network. Presented by solution architect, this session will cover Factory Network, Factory Wireless and Factory Security reference architectures and solutions for delivering business outcomes. This session is targeted for customers dealing with network solutions for control networks including manufacturing and other control environments. Join us and learn how to apply common connected factory architectures to enhance visibility into your operations, increase efficiency, and defense-in-depth security.
  • How to Evolve Your Plant Security from Today’s Reality to Tomorrow’s Connected Factory: Everybody has a vision for the future of manufacturing – Industry 4.0 and more. But what always seems to be left out is how to get there. We know where we are – we might know our security status as well – but the question remains how do we get to where we want to be? This session talks about incremental steps you can take to build a strong, secure foundation and then build up to greater and more secure connectivity.
  • Solutions Demo – Utilizing Network management for increased visibility and security: In this session, we will demonstrate Cisco’s Industrial Network Director ( IND ) and its ability to enable organizations to standardize configurations and provide visibility for operations teams into network operation as it relates to end devices that are connected. We will dive into the integration of IND with Cisco’s Identity Security Engine ( ISE ) to leverage rich industrial contextual information and enable operation teams to apply security policies to end devices based on the intent of the operation of the device. Last we will discuss how IND’s rich industrial information can be pushed into Cisco’s Stealthwatch solution to provide visibility into network traffic and alert on changes to traffic patterns.

Limited space is available, and these workshops will fill up fast. Be sure to register by clicking here for the registration site and choose the city you plan to attend. We look forward to seeing you at these events and working with you on your digital transformation.



Authors

Eric Ehlers

Marketing Manager

Manufacturing and Energy