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SCADA for the Masses?

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In a recent Linkedin discussion among the SCADA Professionals group, Manny Romero, Manager of Madison Technologies Industrial IT&C Division in Sydney, Australia suggested that the cloud could provide “SCADA to the masses.”  This idea sounds interesting, so I thought we might take a closer look.

The premise is that the relationship between traditional SCADA and cloud-enhanced services like M2M and others are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  Perhaps it is a false dichotomy.  Suppose you don’t have to choose?  Maybe you can enjoy the benefits of both.

Romero suggests that we can compare the controversy of SCADA vs. the Cloud to the early 80s when the PC begain gaining popularity for business applications.  While PC advocates were eagerly announcing the death of the mainframe, many in the traditional computing world sneered at the lightweight upstarts, saying that nothing as rinky-dink as a PC could possibly replace the mainframe.

As it turns out, the mainframe didn’t get replaced.  Instead, PCs put tools like spreadsheets and relational databases within reach of individual managers and office staff.  And they opened up new application spaces in areas like education, personal publishing, gaming, and home finances.  Then, with the advent of the Internet, personal computing expanded into email, web surfing, online videos, and more.  In this way, the PC opened the door to “computing for the masses”.

SCADA for the massesThis is what cloud computing may do for SCADA, according to Romero.  He believes that the SCADA systems currently in use will probably continue in their current form for many years to come, but at the same time, cloud-enabled systems may become more common.  How so?

The first thing that comes to mind is industrial and commercial applications that can use some SCADA functionality, but do not need or cannot afford a full-blown SCADA implementation.  Some may be getting by with a web portal and email/SMS messaging, and yet many would benefit from a more sophisticated system, as long as staffing and equipment costs were minimal.  Cloud-enabled SCADA could be a way to meet that need.

What about beyond the world of industrial applications?  Just as the PC revolution brought computing to the masses, could cloud computing bring SCADA to the masses of non-industrial users?  What is SCADA, after all?  Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition.  There is nothing in that definition that limits SCADA to factories, pipelines, and wind turbines.

The rapidly-growing Internet of Things is all about data access, and often includes forms of supervisory control.  As the number of connected devices continues to mushroom, there will be more demand for connectivity options from both the public and private sectors.  Home appliances and HVAC systems, cars and trucks, vending machines, security cameras, and many other types of consumer goods will be increasingly sending data and receiving supervisory control from ordinary citizens.  This could eventually be seen as “SCADA for the masses”.

Will these trends continue?  We won’t have to wait too long to find out.  Five or ten years from now people may take these ideas for granted.  Perhaps in another ten years after that someone will need to research to find out where exactly the term “SCADA for the masses” was first used.  As far as I’m concerned, it was from Manny Romero on Linkedin, in August 2012.

SCADA Professionals Weigh In

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For the past few weeks there has been a lively discussion on the SCADA Professionals group of Linkedin.  Salman Ijazi, an oil and gas professional in the Dallas/Fort Worth area posed the question: “When you think of a cloud based SCADA/monitoring system, what issues come to your mind?”

This topic elicited a wealth of comments from a wide spectrum of engineers, system integrators, managers, and other leaders of thought.  Brian Chapman, SCADA Software Engineer at Schneider Electric was the first and most frequent responder.  His comments ranged from comparisons of the human brain and SCADA systems to detailed analysis of the layered design in a water chlorination system.  Overall, he doesn’t see many possibilities for SCADA on the cloud.

Several respondents agreed with Brian, and some were quite adamant.  Zane Spencer, Automation & Controls Project Manager at MPE Engineering said, “The thought of a cloud-based SCADA system makes me shudder,”  while Earl Vella, Senior Systems Developer at Water Services Corp. in Malta said simply, “SCADA and cloud must never meet.”

Jake Brodsky, Control Systems Engineer at WSSC emphasized the importance of not putting an entire SCADA system on the cloud, pointing to the primary concerns of security, potential latencies in data throughput, and reliability.  He questions the notion of taking “the same old software you’ve been using,” putting it on a cloud platform, and then expecting that you will magically get better service.

In response, others point out that although we should not consider building a SCADA system on a cloud server, cloud computing may still offer significant value to traditional and future SCADA systems.

Jake Hawkes, a platform manager in Calgary suggested that the current practice of outsourcing SCADA systems might lead to SCADA in the cloud as a next logical step.  Ruslan Fatkhullin, CEO of Tesla in Russia, mentioned the advantages of OPC UA for connecting sensors and field systems to cloud servers.  J-D Bamford, CRM/SCADA Security Engineer at Cimation in Denver, pointed out that the cloud can be useful for rapid development of systems serving distributed facilities, while at the same time, traditional HMI developers are already offering web-based solutions for mobile phone and desktop dashboards.

An important distinction was touched on by John Kontolefa, Professional Engineer at NYPA, and seconded by others: not to confuse SCADA systems with DCS (Distributed Control Systems).  There seems to be a consensus among most group members that DCS functionality like automatic, real-time, closed-loop control of critical processes does not belong on the cloud, whereas open-loop SCADA functionality such as simple monitoring and inputs of non-real-time data like adding recipes or fine tuning a process might do fine on a cloud-based system.

Summing up, Salman Iljazi, who posed the initial question, pointed out the value in the oil and gas industries of performing some SCADA functions in the cloud.  The geographical and other constraints that they operate under bring out certain advantages of using the cloud: ease of deployment, maintenance, and expansion, coupled with low infrastructure requirements.  He mentioned applications such as pipeline monitoring, alarm management, hydrocarbon reporting, and well pad monitoring, and proposed that even high security environments such as banking, e-commerce and health systems management may benefit from SCADA functionality in the cloud.

For me, personally, the most intriguing possibility was mentioned subsequently by Manny Romero, Manager of Madison Technologies Industrial IT&C Division in Sydney.  He suggested that the cloud could provide “SCADA to the masses.”  What does that mean?  We’ll talk about it next week.