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These security measures will help secure the environment in our changing and challenging landscape. We are going to lock things down properly and have encrypted connections everywhere.
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Solutions should provide tools to implement security such as HTTPS or SSL for encryption over the web, federated identity providers to identify your users, and technologies such as two-factor authentication or single sign-on. So adopting all of the latest tried-and-true standards and security practices is incredibly important. It is paramount that security is the focus.
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Solution vendors must do all the right things to make sure that people from OT and IT come together. So it’s really just about getting up with the times, if you will.Īnother consideration is to look at it from a security standpoint. We want to be able to plug into other applications or the cloud so that we can get to a higher level of analytics and machine learning. We are setting the trend on how people should think about their systems and their ability to provide data to anybody no matter where they are. It’s important for us to look ahead and to be on top of these trends. SCADA solutions should be able to leverage technologies such as native HTML5 to take advantage of mobile devices. SCADA systems have to work with other systems that can get data to more people. Vendors must be able to provide a superior SCADA solution that does not connect directly to devices but is capable of getting that data and providing the context. Some solutions are now adopting MQTT, which allows users to plug into a corporate infrastructure with any application and quickly get information that they need. Question: How is SCADA adapting to industry’s digital transformation and what role will SCADA play in it?Ĭox: One of the big changes with SCADA solutions is the increasing adoption of open standards, such as OPC UA, which has been around for quite some time. Solutions should also be interoperable and offer tools to implement comprehensive security. What it comes down to is making sure that platform solutions are based on open standards and offer unlimited licensing models to allow users to easily scale and expand industrial systems with reduced limitations. Open-based protocols such as OPC UA and message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) allow for decoupled architectures where data is published into an infrastructure where any application can have access to the data, promoting scalability and flexibility. Proprietary solutions tend to be coupled directly to devices and other systems, which could be problematic for systems that are spread out or remote.
#Microsoft azure and inductive automation ignition upgrade#
You want to find a system that allows you to easily upgrade and maintain your system without having the need to replace an entire system or incur unreasonably high maintenance costs. Having a proprietary system and being locked into a single vendor can cause headaches later down the line. Users should have the ability to find solutions that provide specific functionality and be able to integrate into an overall solution.
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The most important thing for users is to be able to find best-in-class products that are based on open standards and are secure and interoperable.
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