Technology that keeps production moving
Manufacturing environments are demanding. Dust, vibration, temperature extremes, and the simple reality that production doesn't stop for IT problems. Your technology needs to be as reliable as your production line, and it has to span two very different worlds: the operational technology on the factory floor, and the standard IT that runs the rest of the business.
Most managed IT providers are comfortable with the second world and nervous about the first. We treat both as one system. That means integrating operational technology with corporate IT securely rather than leaving the two tangled together, keeping legacy equipment running alongside modern infrastructure, and making sure that when something does go wrong, it gets caught and fixed fast. Your ERP system, inventory management and production scheduling cannot wait for a slow ticket queue.
We treat OT and corporate IT as one connected system.
The principles NZ manufacturers should build to
Manufacturing IT carries risks an office never faces. Your IT provider should design for them from the start, not bolt them on after an incident.
- OT and IT segmentation. The factory floor runs PLCs, SCADA, HMIs and industrial control systems that were rarely designed with internet-era security in mind. Keeping that OT network segmented from corporate IT means a phishing email or compromised laptop cannot reach the machinery that runs production. We use firewalls and VLANs to separate the two and put controlled, logged pathways in place for any vendor remote access.
- Business continuity and uptime. Unplanned downtime is the most expensive event in a plant. We design for resilience with proactive monitoring, redundancy and failover for production-critical systems, and tested backup and disaster recovery so recovery is measured and predictable rather than improvised.
- Intellectual property protection. Designs, process recipes, tooling data and customer specifications are valuable IP. Identity and access management, endpoint protection, email security and network segmentation keep the most sensitive data away from general access, and everything is logged so access is traceable.
- Privacy Act 2020. The Privacy Act applies to the personal information you hold about employees and customers, across both your OT and IT environments. Practical controls, access management, encrypted and tested backups, and a breach response runbook your senior staff can run on a Saturday morning, keep you on the right side of it.
The challenges we see most often
We've worked with manufacturing companies long enough to understand the real-world challenges you face every day: harsh industrial environments damaging standard IT equipment, legacy equipment integration with modern systems, 24/7 uptime requirements with zero tolerance for downtime, OT security and protecting production systems from cyber threats, and complex ERP system management and support.
Our answer is industrial-grade networking designed for factory environments, OT/IT convergence with proper security segmentation, redundant systems and failover to maximise uptime, specialised backup for production-critical systems, and real-time monitoring with proactive alerting.
How we support manufacturers
We run the whole IT stack as a managed service so your team can stay focused on production rather than chasing IT problems. That starts with proactive monitoring and a responsive helpdesk, and extends across the security, connectivity, backup and infrastructure work that keeps a plant running. Because we treat OT and corporate IT as one connected system, the people securing your email are the same people who understand why the line cannot go down.
Engagements usually begin with an assessment: we map the network, identify where OT and IT are tangled together, find the single points of failure, and check that backups are actually recoverable. From there we put a clear plan in place, segmentation, monitoring, redundancy and a tested recovery process, and then run it day to day with regular reviews.
