By Xavier Mesrobian
As companies of all sizes gain more interest in digital transformation and the IoT, they want to move beyond pilot studies to proven solutions and expect the technology to be secure, convenient and reliable.
For this reason, many are looking to Microsoft Azure for a cloud service that can provide the services they need for analyzing their data, applying AI, and more.
Azure was built for collaboration, offering thousands of partner apps in the Azure Marketplace.
Feeding plant data into those tools can have a big impact on the bottom line of any enterprise.
The Skkynet DataHub service for Microsoft Azure helps companies leverage the value of Azure. It provides a shrink-wrapped solution to acquire, monitor, control, consolidate, and share data from any industrial process. Data is collected from the plant floor using standard, open protocols like OPC, MQTT, and SQL, and then streamed to Azure over an SSL-encrypted connection.
Once in Azure, the data is available for IoT Hub or any 3rd-party storage, AI, or analytics program. The same data can be passed along to a user network for use in Microsoft Excel, data historians, or SCADA systems. The data connection can also be configured bidirectionally, for secure supervisory control in real time.
The service works equally well with legacy systems and new installations. It offers a web-enabled HMI to facilitate remote monitoring and supervisory control. It requires no IT policy changes in the plant, no open inbound firewall ports, and no VPNs.
This kind of system can be used in many ways.
For example, you could collect data from a variety of MQTT clients with different data formats including Sparkplug, then aggregate the data and publish it to Azure IoT Hub, a data historian, or cloud application.
Or you could configure a centralized alarm system connected to any number of sites and generate alarms and notifications to go out in any data format including emails or text messages.
Another possibility would be to deploy a centralized network operations center to connect multiple sites, aggregate the information into a unified namespace, and create real-time or historical views of the data in an HMI.
Whatever stage of digital transformation or IoT your customers may be at, putting industrial data into Azure can give them a valuable window into their operations, providing the data they need to optimize production and cut costs.
Xavier Mesrobian is the vice president, sales and marketing, at Skkynet Cloud Systems. He can be reached at xavier.mesrobian@skkynet.com.
This content is sponsored by Skkynet.
