UPDATED 16:15 EDT / JANUARY 12 2017

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Transforming and securing industrial networks adds maintenance value | #ACCELERATE2017

The Internet of Things is about more than just smartphones. Nearly any machine can be hooked into this growing network. Some of those machines, such as the fearsome beasts used in the oil and gas industry, are extremely large, expensive and hungry for maintenance. Patching these machines into the IoT allows a company to coordinate maintenance and detect problems well in advance.

This represents a huge savings in time and money, according to Richard Hannah, VP of information services at Gibson Energy. However, there is also a security concern (see “Cloud, digital business are forcing an enterprise security rethink” for how security needs are evolving).

To learn more about how industrial businesses are dealing with IoT and security, Lisa Martin (@Luccazara) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, spoke to Hannah during the Fortinet Accelerate 2017 conference in Las Vegas. (*Disclosure below.)

Planting the IT flag

The conversation started as Hannah described Gibson Energy and his role there. It is an an oil and gas company, involved in the midstream operations between extraction and retail, he mentioned. Its business entails logistics, trucking, trains and storage.

As a 60-year-old company, Gibson never had a senior IT leader. However, through a number of acquisitions, the company has doubled in size, and so it hired Hannah as VP of IT. He described his role as looking after the operations and security around the company’s technology.

The impact of IoT and a journey to the Cloud

“We have thousands and thousands of devices in the field,” Hannah said. Prior to IoT, monitoring these devices was done manually or not at all. With IoT, operations teams can now watch their devices in real-time, he stated. “It saves thousands of hours of maintenance, thousands of hours of man time.”

To do this required a fair bit of transformation on the IT side. Hannah described how they consolidated, moved to the cloud, and put themselves on a digital journey. Doing this required a new idea of security, however.

As Gibson looked to secure the company’s connectivity and access to the cloud, Fortinet Inc. came out as a clear winning partner, Hannah mentioned. He was impressed by its ability to architect a real security solution for Gibson Energy’s cloud needs. He felt it was imperative to focus on security to protect the company’s IT assets.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2017. (*Disclosure: Fortinet Inc. and other companies sponsor some Accelerate 2017 segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Fortinet nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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