MANUFACTURING IN THE CLOUD: PART IX: A NEED FOR COMPANY-WIDE CLOUD EDUCATION

By Goran Novkovic, MESA Member, CQA, CSQE, ITIL, APM, PMP, PEng

This blog is part of a series called Manufacturing in the Cloud. This series aims to assist manufacturing organizations to evaluate how they can overcome challenges and maximize cloud computing benefits. As cloud computing services mature both commercially and technologically, this is likely to become relatively easier to achieve.

One major challenge for manufacturing organizations moving to the cloud is embedding new ways of working. Changes affecting business and operation including training requirements, changes in working patterns, processes and procedures such as IT support and organizational restructuring.

Manufacturing organizations are responsible to provide the right education about clouds. They need to ensure that training is available to employees on cloud computing infrastructures and services. Successful change management programs have a strong education and training component since all organizational staff need to be kept informed of changes that will affect their day to day responsibilities. Training material and cloud computing workshops are especially helpful in identifying potential issues and embedding the new mindset within manufacturing organizations.

Manufacturing organisations need to consider company-wide training to ensure that their workforce can use and realise the benefits of the cloud services. Training also mitigates the risk that IT resources are accidentally misappropriated and helps to avoid inadvertent lapses in security. Training is therefore crucial in delivering security in the initial stages of adoption, particularly for manufacturing organizations that process commercially sensitive, regulated or government classified data.

Cloud computing education and training should outline what cloud services are available to employees and describe risks and issues associated with the particular cloud model, and how these are being addressed. Create flow charts on how cloud models could enable your organization to meet its business and strategic objectives.

The operational and business benefits of moving to cloud computing model will result in increased agility to supply or volume of manufacturing services, access to high speed bandwidths and other business enabling technologies.

Cloud computing promises a full range of benefits that include the ability to shift costs from capital to operational, lower overall cost of doing business, ability to shift computing resources to value-added activities, improved employee satisfaction, process standardization and competitive market advantages for manufacturing organizations.

Are you still brainstorming and deciding about utilizing cloud computing models? If you have already made decision then keep reading this blog, we will be diving deeper into cloud governance and cybersecurity. 

Goran Novkovic, CQA, CSQE, ITIL, APM, PMP, PEng

Goran Novkovic has over 15 years of experience in various regulated industry sectors. His expertise is in industrial control systems (ICS) cybersecurity, control systems engineering, computer systems validation, software security and test management, cloud security and regulatory compliance. Goran has a formal education in Electrical Engineering and Project Management and possesses a master's degree in Information Technology. He has number of professional licenses and designations. He is holder of CQA (Certified Quality Auditor) and CSQE (Certified Software Quality Engineer) certifications with ASQ (American Society for Quality). Goran is certified ITIL, certified Agile Project Manager and Project Management Professional with PMI (Project Management Institute). He is licensed Professional Engineer with PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario). Goran is focused on ICS cybersecurity and he is helping organizations to establish ICS cybersecurity governance and develop effective ICS cybersecurity programs from scratch. E-mail contact: goran@valiver.com