Comparing Cloud Services for Manufacturers

Grazed from AutomationWorld. Author: Dave Greenfield.

The reliability and low cost of cloud computing is no longer in doubt. When you have providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft offering 99.99 percent uptime and some of the biggest companies in the world using their services, questions of robustness and dependability can be easily answered. Cloud services also offer the bonus of only paying for what you use, easy and low-cost scalability, improved collaboration possibilities, and huge savings on IT support costs.

But concerns about the cloud do still exist for many manufacturers, especially around security and availability. When using public cloud services, all information sent through those networks can be a target for hackers simply because it is on such a network. In addition, the government can access your information on a public cloud without a search warrant, and there can be concerns with bandwidth overload or problems accessing your applications when you have no Internet access. Beyond these issues, there are also concerns about latency and connection failures compared to a direct network connection…

At Inductive Automation’s first user conference, Travis Cox, director of training at Inductive Automation, hosted a session explaining the benefits and concerns surrounding cloud services use by manufacturers. Referencing HMI/SCADA software applications like Inductive Automation’s Ignition, Cox said the best use of the cloud is for data collection and analysis, such as historical data, graphs and tables, reporting, and alarm history…

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