# Towards Flexible Integration of 5G and IIoT Technologies in Industry 4.0: A Practical Use Case
## 6 Benefits  
This section describes the main benefits provided by this work, focusing on the enhancements and new opportunities provided by the proposed architecture, which integrates state-of-the-art technologies such as NFV to the industrial environment where it has been deployed. This work proposes a new approach to managing the life cycle of services, evolving from the traditional monolithic approach to acquiring and deploying network services based on hardware-specific and vendor-specific solutions, to a much more flexible one leveraging virtualization and softwarization. Overall, this leads to a substantial simplification and agilitization in the deployment cycle of new services, also resulting in a reduction in service downtime and in flexible mechanisms to continuously enhance and configure the services as needed. As such, a flexible platform is provided in which it is possible to deploy a wide variety of services (i.e., VNFs), ranging from ML applications and databases to security functions such as firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), or, as a more specific example, the Hidra server covered in the article. These services can then become part of the service catalog so that an authorized user can deploy any of them in the corresponding slice in just minutes. VNFs from the catalog can be combined in different ways and with different connectivity patterns in order to create rich NSs specifically tuned to satisfy the requirements of a given use case. The ability to deploy services in separate slices provides isolation at both the data and performance levels for different manufacturing processes. This is particularly important in industrial scenarios in order to avoid data leaks between different business processes, in addition to ensuring a lack of resource contention that could impact the performance of the applications. This is further enabled thanks to the high granularity provided by SDN to classify network traffic, which makes it possible to define traffic flows as specific or granular as necessary, taking into account all the security, privacy, and performance (e.g., bandwidth) considerations involved. Furthermore, this isolation is achieved despite all services sharing the same underlying networking and computing infrastructure, which significantly reduces the deployment costs. However, this flexibility is not just restrained to services specifically designed for the CFAA. The open nature of the NFV standards enables interoperability between different NFV solutions. This means that VNFs designed within SN4I can also be offered by third parties and directly used in  
Figure 10: Global operation. other infrastructures. The opposite is also true, and VNFs from external vendors or designers can be added to the SN4I catalog and integrated into NSs provided by SN4I and into its specific computing and networking infrastructure. Meanwhile, the heavily automatized and agile service deployment and life cycle management open up the possibility to introduce new ways in which services can transition from a development version to production deployment. A service can be first tested and validated in a local datacenter with minimum resources, and then deployed and integrated into the production datacenter in-plant, adjusting the resource and connectivity requirements as appropriate. This effectively aligns with the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) paradigm frequently used in software development, which is driven by introducing ongoing automation and monitoring in the development process through incremental changes and continuous feedback in the integration and delivery of the product. Even though SN4I currently comprises two datacenters in two separate locations (EIB and CFAA), the integration of additional datacenters is possible. Under the orchestration of the same centralized NFV MANO, it is possible to attach additional remote datacenters, or even public clouds, which could provide additional hardware resources and capabilities in order to adapt to the requirements of future applications.