How to get operational data off the factory floor without creating an IT breach

Informational and operational technology data have long been treated as separate domains.

But AI changed the game. Today, you need the capacity to regularly ingest OT data into your IT systems without a hitch. (Or a breach.) You risk being left behind as your competitors put all their data to work, or assume the risk of consistently importing data from the edge to your internal systems. 

This problem is an immediate one for any company unwilling to be left behind in the AI era: If you want to take full advantage of AI, you need quick, ready access to relevant data. And if your physical operations have hit a snag, your digital tools need to be kept in the loop regularly.

The solution is not to build a host of custom scripts or depend on legacy FTP or SFTP solutions to bring data in from the edge. Those disparate tools can degrade, leak data, and fail during later, repeated OT data extraction runs.

Instead, engineers looking to free IT and OT data from their respective siloes are turning to a managed solution that offers strong encryption, continuous transfer monitoring, and the ability to fully audit every data handoff across the pipeline

Even more, OT systems — the Programmable Logic Controllers, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition platforms, and historian databases running protocols like Modbus and OPC UA — were designed for uptime rather than connectivity. In modern architecture, however, no operational data can be left behind.

Getting data out of these environments means working against a connectivity model that was never meant to support the polling frequency or authentication patterns that modern IT infrastructure expects. Adding to the challenge, the more tools you introduce to free the OT data, the more attack vectors they may open.

A breach at the OT boundary can affect the physical systems those networks control. That’s a risk calculus most IT security frameworks weren’t built to handle.

On at 12 p.m. Eastern/9 a.m. On Tuesday, June 23, Fortra’s Jerrod Foster & Michael Barford will join The New Stack to discuss IT and OT systems, why extracting operational technology data is challenging, and how Fortra GoAnywhere MFT can resolve both data movement and data security issues that many engineers face today.

Register here to join the conversation:

What you’ll take away:

• Why the IT/OT boundary is an AI infrastructure problem: How the connectivity gap between operational and information technology creates a hard ceiling for teams building on live operational data — and what becomes possible when that data is reliably accessible inside modern pipelines.
• Where DIY solutions break: Why custom scripts and legacy transfer tools fail under real operational conditions — brittle transfers, no visibility, and attack surfaces you can’t audit.
• What secure OT data movement actually looks like: How Fortra GoAnywhere MFT provides an encrypted, automated, and auditable data movement layer that works with the constraints of real OT environments, not against them.

Alex Wilhelm is a journalist focused on technology and finance. He co-hosts the This Week in Startups podcast, and writes the Cautious Optimism newsletter. He was previously Editor in Chief of TechCrunch+.

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