June 2021

32 n COMMUNICATIONS, SECURITY AND NETWORKING June 2021 www.drivesncontrols.com Data: should you process it locally or in the cloud? T here is certainly a buzz around the idea of digitalisation, for its ability to deliver the benefits offered by greater visualisation and analysis of data and to gain a greater understanding of the root causes of unexpected downtime and production bottlenecks. But what are the options and how can they best be applied? One benefit of digitalisation – in addition to offering better connections to devices at the plant level – is its potential to escalate data to other systems and to allow plants to be monitored remotely, in more depth, over longer distances, and for longer periods than has been possible in the past. Manufacturing traceability, for example, would traditionally have been achieved via paper-based batch recording, while product- level traceability would not have been achievable without digital technology. Predictive maintenance could be achieved, but only via periodic monitoring of devices. So, digitalisation brings with it a host of valuable new functions which make use of the data that probably already existed on the production line but was stranded in disparate systems. At its most simplistic, digitalisation is about integrating devices to gain information about them that helps to rectify problems. However, the potential goes much further, and the benefits of digitising will be spread across an enterprise. Visualisation, for example, can give greater insight into how productive and efficient the entire manufacturing plant is. The biggest barrier to adopting digital technology revolves around the fact that operational technology (OT) was traditionally designed around the need to optimise machines, using architectures and networks that provide optimal performance. However, because the success of digitalisation projects relies on the worlds of IT and OT merging, OT technology has needed to evolve to make it more able to integrate with the wider world. Modern machine controls incorporate IT functions. Omron’s Sysmac controller, for example, includes direct SQL database connectivity and can also be provided with OPC-UA, as well as MQTT, helping to achieve a simple, seamless method of escalating operational information from the machine level to the IT environment, and vice versa. Middleware systems are also now available that can act as gateways to link legacy devices to the IT world, where necessary. Data handling On-premises servers can handle data for applications that need fast access to data. When it comes to connecting the OT environment to the rest of the world, security is often a concern. However, if the intention is to analyse and store data in an local IT server, security should already be provided by the factory firewall or existing security infrastructure. But, because any connection point may be a potential security threat, there are always some security measures that should need to be taken. One way to address this issue is through the recognised IT security measure of using“trusted certificates”. The trusted certification is unique to the OT device on which it resides and can be identified easily by the IT server. The downside of on-premises servers is that they cannot store infinite amounts of data, so if an application requires huge amounts of data to be processed, a better approach would be to use a cloud-based server – however, this would need more stringent security. The cloud can provide scalable data storage that is not limited by capacity and does not need any architecture changes if storage needs change. The downside of cloud-based servers is that they cannot provide real-time connections. There will always be some latency when it comes to processing and reacting to data. Different data storage platforms offer benefits in different applications. Tasks such as Is it better to process manufacturing data locally in your plant, or remotely in the cloud? Omron’s regional marketing manager for the UK, Dan Rossek, assesses the pros and cons of options including local servers, edge devices and the cloud. Edge computing allows fast reactions to data near its point of creation, but cannot handle large amounts of data