Internet of Things (IoT) is disrupting transformations across the industries—from consumer, manufacturing, and utilities to enterprise, agriculture, healthcare, government, and cities. But to provide specialized requirements of industries such as manufacturing, oil and gas, and utilities, there is Industrial IoT (IIoT), a subset of the larger IoT. In spite of the high similarities between IoT and IIoT, industrial IoT differs from IoT differ regarding things like security, interoperability, scalability, reliance, and automation. Thereby, it becomes highly essential to understand the differences before implementing industrial IoT solution for use.

Security is one of the most critical requirements in the industrial solutions as a small disruption in high volume manufacturing process can results loss costing millions of dollars per day. IIoT solutions incorporate various advanced security measures, from threat detection, secure and resilient system architectures, specialized chipsets, encryption, and authentication, to management processes. Likewise, IoT solutions for industries need to sync with the existing legacy operations technologies and to manufacturing execution systems. Industrial IoT solutions are efficient in supporting and integrating the necessary protocols and data sets while functioning reliably with those systems and technologies. Having almost the same functionalities as IoT technologies, Industrial IoT solutions are more adept to underpin high availability, and withstand high duty cycles round the clock for years, supporting shutdown only during maintenance.

Both IoT and IIoT solutions assimilate these variables but differ in the way they are implemented. Buyers should closely examine these parameters as vendors delivering these IIoT solutions might be originally emerging from adjacent markets and offering solutions that may not be robust enough for industrial applications.