By Sudhir Kunder
When people think of Industry 4.0, they usually focus on artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation. And honestly, that’s not unfair. Walk into any modern plant, and you’ll see exactly why: output’s up, quality’s better, and efficiency gains are showing up everywhere you look.
Today’s factories run on data. Machines talk to applications, sensors feed in streams of information around the clock, and AI systems crunch through it all to support faster, sharper decisions. None of this happens in a vacuum; getting data where it needs to go, quickly, securely, and reliably, has quietly become one of the foundations of modern manufacturing.
That shift is already playing out across India’s industrial landscape. Collaborative robots — cobots are showing up on factory floors not as replacements for workers but as colleagues, taking on the repetitive, physically demanding, or precision-heavy work so people can focus on tasks that need real judgment and expertise. One leading Indian automotive manufacturer has gone all in, deploying more than 100 cobots across its production facilities for everything from material handling to machine tending and assembly.
And the numbers back this up. The International Federation of Robotics reports that India installed 8,510 industrial robots in 2023, a 59% increase from the year before. A large share of that growth came from the automotive sector, driven by EV investments, production modernisation, and the constant push for better quality and efficiency.
But buying robots is the easy part. The harder and far more valuable work is getting machines, systems, and people to actually function as one.
Consider everything a modern factory generates in terms of data: sensors tracking equipment health, cameras inspecting products in real time, AI models spotting patterns, digital twins simulating outcomes before anything changes on the production line. For any of this to deliver real value, information has to move continuously, without delay.
That’s the point where connectivity stops being background plumbing and becomes a genuinely business-critical capability.
Older networks were built for a world of centralised applications and fairly predictable traffic. Manufacturing today looks nothing like that. Data now moves between the factory floor, cloud platforms, suppliers, edge locations, and enterprise systems often all at once.
On top of that, so many industrial applications run in real time. A machine-vision system catching a defect, a predictive-maintenance platform flagging a failure before it happens, a cobot reacting to a worker’s movement- none of these can tolerate delay. Even a fraction of a second can affect performance, productivity, and operational efficiency.
This is why manufacturers are increasingly leaning on a mix of cloud and edge computing. Cloud platforms provide the scale needed for analytics and business applications, while edge infrastructure handles time-sensitive processing closer to where the data is actually generated. The result: faster response times without sacrificing the flexibility that growing digital operations need.
Security matters just as much here. Manufacturing no longer stops at the factory gate. Production systems now connect to suppliers, logistics partners, cloud services, and remote teams a far more interconnected ecosystem than anything that came before.
That connectivity opens doors, but it also adds complexity. Cybersecurity and networking can’t really be treated as separate functions anymore; the two are converging, as organisations try to protect their operations without slowing down innovation. What’s needed is visibility across the entire digital environment, plus the ability to apply consistent security policies wherever users, applications, or devices are.
Nowhere is this more apparent than where humans and machines share the same space. Cobots depend on constant communication with sensors, control systems, and AI applications. Machine vision platforms process vast volumes of information every second. Safety mechanisms need to respond instantly as conditions change. In environments like these, network performance isn’t a technical detail in the background — it directly shapes operational outcomes.
So, what’s next? Here’s the thing – all the noise around AI and robotics tends to drown out something far less glamorous but arguably more important. The wiring underneath it all, the stuff that actually connects every sensor, machine, and system, is going to matter just as much as the flashy tech sitting on top of it. As factories get more automated and more data-hungry, that connectivity stops being a backend detail and starts being the thing that determines whether innovation, resilience, and growth actually show up.
India’s manufacturing story right now is genuinely hard not to get excited about. Money is pouring into automation, AI, and smart factory tech, and the upside is a more agile, more competitive industrial base on the global stage. But here’s the catch nobody likes talking about: none of that works if the basics aren’t sorted. Manufacturers need a digital foundation solid enough to move information securely, quickly, and without constant hiccups; otherwise, the fancy stuff just sits there.
Picture a factory floors a few years out. AI quietly crunching numbers. Cobots working alongside people like just another set of hands. Data steering most of the decisions. And underneath all of it, something almost embarrassingly basic keeping the whole thing alive: every machine, app, and person staying connected, all the time, without anyone thinking twice about it. That, more than anything, is the real story of Industry 4.0. Not the intelligence everyone keeps talking about, but the network nobody notices until it breaks.
(The author is Sudhir Kunder, Chief Business Officer, DE-CIX India, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
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