A year ago, many manufacturers were contemplating how they were going to weave IIoT into their fabric of information and their existing IT systems. Fast forward to today and we have adapted to virtual meetings and working from home. We used to get answers simply by walking through a plant floor or running a report in the office, but for many of us, that is still not an option. These answers need to be obtained remotely. Access is one of the biggest issues. How do we securely allow for a remote connection into the servers and determine who can gain access? This can be a difficult situation because it’s very likely that what one person feels they need to have access to, may not be what the IT department and supervisor deem necessary. They can determine who needs what and when. Can they openly access the IoT information that gets fed into reporting software or processors? Can you use firewalls that are time-locked out, much like the safes in the movies that can’t be opened until morning once they’re locked? Once you determine who is authorized and needs the information, you can look at the next phase of “How?”
How do the users need the information? I’ll use a simple example of a sensor that tracks the machine running versus not running. Once that sensor feeds the information into the accumulation device or control through a gateway, it will be populated and push the information up to the cloud where others can access it. The uptime may combine with the data for the jobs to help managers in production to determine if they will meet their demands or if they will have to run overtime. Other programs such as maintenance programs that plan for preventive care using hours of run time as a parameter need to use these registers also. The sharing of data with people and programs is a very important part of IoT.