Cloud in the Industrial Landscape

I am struggling and understand why there is a debate on Cloud in the Industrial Architectures.The Cloud is here, it is real, and most of us use it many ways today. Many of us had a similar concept in past architectures with main frames, for central data storage. The Cloud technology provides a natural fit to many Industrial Operational Landscapes, in order to address multi site, the roaming user outside the plant, and sharing of information across the industrial enterprise.

For the past year, I have talked about the evolving the Industrial Enterprise, with multiple sites, and the need for standards, in KPIs, data structures, objects layouts etc. How to achieve this without a central repository? With the infra structure increasing both in networks both wired and wireless, 3G/ 4G that all devices can leverage this growing infrastructure. Even in remote places on distributed gas fields, people are designing the industrial architecture to leverage the 3 G mobile networks, providing  10 mb with a dual modem, so why not?

Certainly as we access the changing "jobs to be done" or increased scope knowledge workers are responsible for across sites, the increased data/information access, we see Cloud as a natural part of the architecture both public and private, or within a plant site, but still managed from outside service. Things are changing too quickly on the IT side for people to keep up, and the need for common.

So you will start to see historians be sold in the cloud, already Enterprise Asset Management systems are sold as a service hosted in the cloud running across multiple sites.

In small businesses (e.g.| Companies/ sites with small employee counts and often not It or engineering resources on site),  the concept of MES, information systems, historians, and even HMIs be hosted or sold as a service is logical. You maybe laughing at the HMI as it “must” be local, yes, but I went to 3 small business sites last week, and all would prefer not having any PCs / servers on their site. Already their ERP and back office (Microsoft Office) hosted outside, so why not HMI, Historians and MES? With “thin client technology, virtual machines”  there is no need to put a PC on the shop floor, it is easier to have a thin client that enables independence of the Operating System.

Standards such as report templates, KPIs, Knowledge based systems all need to be central, and the cloud technologies like MS Azure enable the infrastructure out of the box.

At Invensys we are assuming the Cloud as an option in solution architectures as people go forward, that does not mean it is required, but people can start with an " on premise" and evolve latter on the technology should allow this. The industrial applications should evolve with the architecture, allow companies to expand and evolve, even having different architectures for the large plants vs the small plants, but still achieving the unified industrial landscape.

Instead of saying, it will not apply in the industrial world, this technology provides the opportunity to solve some of the remote operational challengers end users are facing with standard technology, in a secure way. Instead of asking “WHY WOULD WE USE CLOUD in INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS?”. We would should be asking “WHY NOT USE THE STANDARD OFF THE SHELF CAPABILITY SUCH AS CLOUD?”