DATA CLARITY
NOVOTEK
UNDERSTANDING DATA
SERVITISATION AND
DATA OWNERSHIP
Data is the most important raw material in industry. Yet few
understand who owns it after it is created, or what rights they have
while storing it. A lot of the issues that data ownership presents are
not what they seem at first glance. Here, Sean Robinson, service
leader at utilities control systems provider Novotek UK and Ireland,
explains who owns what with regards to industrial data and
explains what risks can arise and how to protect your business from
them.
Forbes reports that we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every
day. This huge quantity of data allows businesses to extrapolate
trends, fine tune their systems and create simulations with a high
level of realism. Although for many, this means that data has been
commoditised to a certain extent — being freely traded like any
other currency — for private businesses, data is still very much
a valuable asset to gain a competitive advantage from. Here,
establishing ownership of the data becomes an important issue.
Before diving into more complex matters, lets address the simple
answers to the simple questions. The platform on which you store
information does not own your data, just as when moving house
you might store your books in a storage box, but the removals
company doesn’t own them. In the case of industrial data it should
be securely encrypted, meaning that even if someone could access
your books, they wouldn’t be able to read them!
Furthermore, all questions of ownership should be clearly
delineated within the user contract. Therefore, the contract is
the best way to fully understand how much protection you have,
and fully comprehend all the niceties of who owns what in every
situation.
LEASING, RECORDING AND STORING
Now for the more complex issues. In industry it is very common for
companies to lease all kinds of parts, from pumps to machine tools.
It is also likely that one or both of the companies in question, the
provider and the company renting the product, will want to record
data. They may even use a third party for the recording process.
As such, there could be an argument for split ownership of the
intellectual property created.
Luckily most of this information will not be interoperable. It may
deliver deep insight into the machinery, but small variables could
make the information useless when applied to any part not in
the exact condition of the original. Variables including humidity,
altitude, temperature or, in the case of a pump the makeup of
the fluid being pushed through it will have a huge impact one
the inferences that can be drawn from the data. This represents a
natural defence against misplaced or stolen data.
However, this is not a fool proof protection. For example, let’s say
you produce a slurry for a specific chemical product. The pump
must be finetuned for the slurry’s specific granularity, because it
contains a variety of specifically sized pellets that are central to its
use.
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To make sure you don’t crush the pellets, you should finetune the
pump that you have leased and in so doing share the tuning data
paired with sensitive information to the pump company. Armed with
this information, the pump company could theoretically deduce the
process. If you lease multiple parts from the same company, they
could, over time, deduce your entire process.
With your entire process in one hand, and all of your finely tuned
data in the other, there is nothing to stop the leased equipment
provider from selling the information to a competitor or otherwise
misusing it. They would also be able to access all the benefits of your
painstakingly made improvements at zero cost.
To stop this from happening there are many ways to protect your IP.
The first is to only release certain information, for instance only the
vibration information about the part. This will allow finetuning to be
performed while protecting your IP.
Another method is flushing your data. This is for occasions when the
sensitive information must be stored within the part itself. Flushing
your data means that, after your lease is over, the device has all of
your sensitive information, such as recipes or formulas, wiped from it.
THE IMPACT OF SMART SENSORS
If all your data is collected by smart sensors, a novel method of
protecting it, while allowing all parties to obtain useful analysis, is to
use an IoT platform, such as GE Digital’s Predix. This allows the user
to take in all primary sources of data and then send the applicable
parts and analysis to the relevant parties. This allows for seamless
transparency in data ownership and privacy.
Overall, the best way to protect your data is to set out clearly in your
contract who owns what. Thinking through the outcomes that could
be created by mishandling sensitive before signing those contracts is
sensible. Stipulating precisely what can be retained, what has to be
anonymised and what must be deleted after a run is complete is the
only way to completely protect your IP.
After all, you can build walls to protect yourself but if you hand out
keys to everyone what good are they?
By applying these suggestions, we can make sure that the vast
quantity of data that is generated every day in our manufacturing
plants, buildings and warehouses is not wasted or misused. Instead
we can make sure that the data is protected, whilst also bearing
fruits useful to all.
www: https://www.novotek.com/uk/