It is a matter of "when" not “if" for the cloud in Industry!

At the Invensys North American user conference, last week the discussion and chatter around cloud was in full swing. Many people on a discovery phase, realising that it was not "if” it was more " when"!

Even in the large companies while the issue of security and IP protection was significant and a hot topic for discussion, there was a general feeling this will be resolved and proven in the next couple of years, opening up the opportunity for companies to considerate possibilities.

It was clear that many companies are a different maturity, thought pattern relative to cloud.

In many of my Operational Transformation sessions, the discussion and realization that the business operational requirements of the next decade are most effectively satisfied by the cloud architecture no matter if it is "private" or public. Key was the discussion around even design current solution architectures in a way that will easily expand to the cloud when the security concerns are satisfied.

 Interestingly some of the leading companies realized the significant initial opportunity is the delivery of operational/ industrial services such as historian, MES, operational work procedures with domain solutions built on top to small and remote sites. These sites have limited engineering, and it local support and this has been the barrier for adoption of many of the traditional tools applied in the larger plants. In a simple way the ability to have multiple end sites historized their information (it maybe on a few tags or items) have calculations performed on them and but without having to install, setup or maintain a historian or information set of clients. Small numbers of tags and limited knowledge has restricted use of such tools. This can all change now, with the cloud infrastructure that can expand, and access sites in a secure way even if it a one “diode” out of the plants, the information can now be stored, structured and then a set of safe tools provided for access. So in locations like India, China, south East Asia and small sites in USA the opportunity for using these tools limited to larger sites with support capability is key.

My thoughts swing back to my trip earlier in the year to New Zealand where an engineer from Water waste water industry just stated ”why would you put another server on  remote sites, the hassle of sustaining them in harsh environments, patch managing, and just keeping fan going when there is not local service is too much”. Last week this underlying message kept ringing through from all sized companies, as a real opportunity for reduction in sustaining costs, and increasing the reliability and increased value to these remote small sites.

What I wanted to point out throughout this year the momentum “wave” and discussion around the possibilities with using cloud has increased dramatically. As companies like Invensys focus on understanding the customer’s barriers to adoption and work on the IP and Security concerns to enable a “trusted system”, the adoption will increase. All Enterprise Architects in Industrial space need consider, especially the smaller remote sites that as a central engineering and IT organization there is cost and trouble is servicing effectively.