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Remote Operations for the Post-COVID Era

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A recent article, Remote Operations for the Post-COVID Era, by Harry Forbes at in ARC Advisory Group, tells how the COVID-19 pandemic has forced a greater number of people to work remotely than ever before. The author observes that the need for remote access to production data is not likely to diminish in the foreseeable future.

“Supporting a much larger set of remote knowledge workers will be critical for success in the next one to two years and will probably become an expected part of ‘the new, new normal'” Forbes says.

To illustrate the value and practicality of remote operations, Forbes presents a case study of the recently-completed TANAP pipeline project in Turkey. In this system OPC servers across the entire breadth of the country are connected to a central control room, where they are monitored and controlled by production engineers in real time. Skkynet’s DataHub technology was used to provide the secure data connectivity for the project.

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Working Remotely to Stop Coronavirus

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Companies using Skkynet software and services expect high security for their data communications. They know they can stop computer viruses by keeping all inbound firewall ports closed. Now, with the coronavirus looming large we must do pretty much the same thing in real life. We need to keep our distance and stay behind physical walls as much as possible. And yet work must go on. The data must get through. We need to work remotely, if possible.

The problem is, logging in remotely can be risky.  Typically, you need to expose your servers via the web or a VPN―and that’s a risk that our industrial control customers cannot take.  They need tighter security, to access to their process data without exposing the process servers and networks.  Skkynet’s unique tunnelling technology provides this kind of secure access.  It lets users securely push data from their plants to our SkkyHub service, where they can access it in real time, all without opening firewalls to the outside world.

A Helping Hand

We are now offering this service at no cost to help our customers weather the coronavirus storm. For the next three months any DataHub user can connect to SkkyHub free of charge. A simple tunnel connection provides a way to access data remotely, even through DMZs and proxies. The SkkyHub service includes a web-based interface, SkkyHub WebView, that lets people build dashboards to access their data and interact with their systems from home. Those who are new to WebView can quickly get up to speed, designing pages through its web interface.  With SkkyHub, users can view and operate their control systems remotely as quickly and easily as being right in the control room.

Let’s face it. These are not easy times. Some factories have been forced to shut down, and restarting will be difficult, as Matthew Littlefield at LNS Research explains in this blog, Closing Factories is Hard, Re-Opening will be Harder. Remote access can alleviate these problems to some degree, but it must be reliable and above all, secure.

In another blog, Coronavirus Lessons for Industrial Cybersecurity: Quarantines, Sid Snitkin at ARC Advisory Group compares quarantines for coronavirus to securing industrial systems, and suggests, “Use DMZs, firewalls, zero-trust access control, anti-malware software, awareness training, and security hygiene to reduce the likelihood of an initial compromise.” He also recommends system segmentation to limit lateral movement of viruses, continuous device and system monitoring, and strengthening tools to prevent future attacks.

Doesn’t that sound a little like social distancing, washing hands, not travelling, and keeping our immune systems strong? The social structures we have developed throughout history and the technical systems we have built recently are not as different as we might imagine. They both can serve us well, but we need to protect them and keep them, like ourselves, in good health.

Renewable Power is Now Affordable

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In the late 1980s I was working at company in the USA that sold natural gas through direct purchase. Always on the lookout for new opportunities in the energy field, at one point they gave me a special assignment to research solar energy. We needed to know when solar would be cost-effective, competitive with coal, oil, gas, or nuclear.

In those pre-Internet days, I had to head over to the nearby university library and pore through scientific journals and economic publications to come up with some predictions. From all I could gather, the experts seemed to agree that solar would take at least 5 years before it would be worthwhile to invest in. So the project went on hold, but I was eagerly looking forward to a clean, renewable source of energy to become widely available in the early ’90s.

Well, it has actually taken closer to 30 years, but it appears that the tide is finally turning. A recent report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says that renewable power, including solar and wind, were more affordable in 2017 than ever before, and are now strongly competitive in many locations and applications.

A few IRENA report findings

“Renewable power generation costs continue to fall and are already very competitive to meet needs for new capacity.”

“The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from solar photovoltaics (PV) decreased by 69% between 2010 and 2016 – coming well into the cost range of fossil fuels.”

“Onshore wind, whose costs fell 18% in the same period, provides very competitive electricity, with projects routinely commissioned nowadays at USD 0.04/kWh.”

“As installation accelerates, the cost equation for renewables just gets better and better. With every doubling of cumulative installed capacity for onshore wind, investment costs drop by 9% while the resulting electricity becomes 15% cheaper.”

I find these statistics very encouraging, because now more than ever, the world needs abundant sources of energy at affordable prices. This is the energy that will power industry, commerce, and households for decades and centuries to come.

Data connectivity plays a role

I’m also pleased that Skkynet is responsible, in a quiet but important way, for some of these cost reductions. With increasingly more efficient and secure data connectivity, our customers who install and monitor wind turbines or solar panels are improving their quality of service and cutting their costs. Ultimately these savings are passed on to the consumers and industrial users of the energy. As the costs continue to drop, investment in renewables will increase.

Of course, conventional power plants, pipelines, and offshore oil platforms are also cutting their costs through secure remote monitoring and supervisory control. Improved access to production data benefits everyone across the board. So, I expect that the changeover to renewables will continue in the same gradual, steady way into the foreseeable future. Let’s see what the next 30 years have in store.

Industrial Product Servitization Via the IIoT

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Now there’s a ten-dollar word for you: “servitization.” It has emerged from the trend of industrialized societies to move away from manufacturing-based economies towards service-based economies. Applying this trend to products, the term “servitization” was popularized by Tim Baines at Aston Business School, who sees a “product as a platform for delivering services.” IBM shifts its focus from selling computers to selling business services. Rolls Royce sells propulsion instead of jet engines. Alstom ties its railroad maintenance contracts not to reduced equipment failures, but to fewer “lost customer hours.” These are just a few examples of servitization—a transition from selling products to selling services.

In a recent article, Servitization for Industrial Products, Ralph Rio at ARC Advisory Group shows how the trend of servitization is now impacting the factory floor itself. As production machinery grows increasingly sophisticated, plant managers find their staff less able to maintain and repair it by themselves. They need more services from vendors. Machine builders and OEMs are providing more training, more extensive maintenance contracts, and better condition monitoring of the equipment they supply. “Services have become an inseparable component of the product,” Rio says.

Benefits

The benefits are significant. Predictive maintenance offered as a service means reduced stoppages due to equipment failure, and fewer but more efficient service calls when problems do arise. A growing trend is to provide condition monitoring services, which guide operators to run their machinery more effectively, increasing the lifespan of the equipment and improving output and product quality.

To be most effective, condition monitoring needs to run 24/7 in real time, ideally via a connection to the equipment vendor or supplier. Thus, the Industrial IoT is the logical choice for data communication. “To implement servitization, suppliers will need to adopt Industrial IoT for condition monitoring,” Rio predicts.

Two-way street

As we see it, this level of service works best as a two-way street. Data related to the condition of the machine flows to the supplier, while guidance and adjustments coming from the supplier can flow back the plant staff and equipment. This kind of feedback is invaluable for optimizing machine performance. A one-way IoT model that simply collects data for off-line analysis may not be adequate for many use cases. Technically more sophisticated, bidirectional data flow is useful in many condition monitoring scenarios, and thus has always been an option for Skkynet customers.

If the lessons of the past few decades are any indicator, the servitization trend will continue to grow, both among industrialized and emerging nations. And the Industrial IoT will almost certainly play an important role in providing data communications. As long as those communications are robust and secure, we can expect to see more and more IoT-based industrial product servitization, even though that term itself may never become a household word.

Extraordinary Remote Service Management through IIoT

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We’ve all heard about helicopter parents. You know, that mom or dad that keeps hovering over their child, choosing their clothes and their friends, checking out their Facebook pages, watching their every move. Hey, after all, they’ve invested a lot of time and money into their offspring, and they aren’t going to just let those kids go out on their own and mess things up, right?

While that might not be the best parenting model for human children, it may transfer well to physical products—particularly expensive, complicated products like machine tools. Builders of industrial equipment are often responsible, by choice or by contract, for the performance and maintenance of their machinery for years after the sale. Mechanical failure is not an option for an assembly line whose down-time costs can be in the tens of thousands of dollars per minute. More and more customers buying equipment are looking for 24/7 monitoring and remote service management. And more and more vendors and OEMs are turning to the Industrial IoT (IIoT) for solutions.

With or without IIoT?

Consider the options. Without the IIoT, a lot of time gets wasted between the detection of a problem and a repair. The company calls the vendor, who sends out a rep to inspect. The rep then processes a work order, which may require a second visit by someone with the right skills, tools, and parts to make the repair. The whole process can take hours, even days, while the machine, and sometimes the whole line, sits idle.

With the IIoT, the vendor or OEM maintains a full-time connection to the machine, and can continuously monitor every aspect of its health, such as operating temperatures, abnormal vibrations, fluid levels, and so on, via the web. Before a problem is even noticed by an operator, the vendor can detect an irregularity, assess the situation, manage a work order, and send out repair personnel right away. Sometimes they can even make the repair remotely, without any on-site visit at all.

“OEMs tell ARC that 30 percent or more of the repairs can be made via the web by modifying parameters remotely or with minor assistance by an onsite person,” says Ralph Rio of ARC Advisory Group in a recent article, How IIoT Improves Field Service Management KPIs.

Extraordinary service

The IIoT makes an extraordinary level of service possible. But it’s not just any IoT platform that will be so helpful. Giving a vendor access to a piece of equipment inside a plant requires deep trust. The connection needs to be secure. Within that secure connection, the vendor should not have access to the whole plant network, just to the data. And then, to modify a parameter or change a machine set point requires bidirectional data flow.

Many IoT platforms offer Internet connections, but few of them can securely connect into an industrial plant without opening a firewall. Among those that can, many rely on VPN technology, which opens the whole plant network to the vendor. Of those that are able to make a connection without a VPN and still keep all firewalls closed, most are offering only one-way data flow, from the plant to the cloud. It takes an extraordinary service to provide what Ralph Rio is talking about: the ability to modify parameters remotely, and do it securely. It is exactly this extraordinary level of service that SkkyHub offers. For those vendors and OEMs that want supervisory control over their offspring—their products—this is the kind of remote service management that works best.

Red Lion adds new platforms for cellular RTUs that further IIoT connectivity

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Red Lion Controls, a global expert in communication, monitoring, and control for industrial automation and networking, announced that its RAM industrial routers and cellular RTUs now support the Microsoft Azure, Cumulocity, and Nokia IMPACT IIoT platforms.

This follows the recent announcement that Red Lion’s RAM products now support the MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. The addition of these two platforms moves Red Lion RAM products to lead the market in the greatest number of platform integrations, providing greater flexibility for industrial customers to quickly connect to their choice of leading IIoT cloud platforms.

In addition to those announced, RAMQTT, Red Lion’s embedded MQTT client, simplifies implementations with pre-configured profiles for AT&T M2X, AWS IoT Core, AutoDesk Fusion Connect and Telenor Connexion. Customers connect using a simple drop-down menu to select their cloud platform of choice. Also, using the RAM Software Development Kit (SDK), connectivity can be enabled with additional platforms, including LEC IQ Web SCADA, Set-Point IPwebcontrol, Skkynet SkkyHub, and Telit deviceWISE.

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