Proactive Measures for Long-Term Improvements in SCADA

Automatic reporting eliminates errors and obtains information, saving time, and organizations can perform manual checks to guarantee that the machines are gathering data accurately.

FREMONT, CA: The long-term success of the water utility's SCADA system necessitates a sustainable architecture that allows the system to adapt and scale. Implementing strong cybersecurity into the SCADA system is vital to protect against escalating security risks. Water utilities face many challenges, including pressures to adopt new technologies with limited resources, aging infrastructure, and outmoded technology. A utility's approach to its SCADA system is vital to success in this climate. Requirements constantly change, and utilities frequently seek short-term, cost-effective solutions. It results in many vendors' haphazard add-on technologies and hardware, which can have costly long-term effects.

Efficient data collection from remote locations

Setting a standard protocol is the first step toward a more sustainable SCADA system. By selecting equipment that supports a specific protocol, everything can communicate in the same language, and software is swapped more readily. In addition to choosing a new standard protocol, considering concerns such as bandwidth, latency, and connectivity can all impact data collecting from faraway sites. Establishing edge devices in remote locations to poll locally and report by exception can buffer data polling locally; data is not lost when the network goes down.

A server-centric architecture saves time and money

Server-centric architecture is essential for a long-term SCADA system. Instead of managing several installs on multiple devices, a server-centric solution requires software to be installed on a single server. Because the server handles all data collecting and visualization, it is a single point of failure. Hence redundancy is essential to guarantee uptime in the case of a server failure. The licensing options provided by server-centric architecture are a vital element, with the system licensed by the server and unlimited for everything else. There are now several alternatives for server-licensed SCADA systems.

Using cross-platform SCADA to avoid upgrade difficulties

Traditional SCADA systems tied to particular operating systems can provide problems for utilities when these versions are near the end of their life cycle and force enterprises to make costly upgrades. Utilizing a fully cross-platform SCADA system should be able to be upgraded independently in a sustainable SCADA architecture. Newer versions of cross-platform programming languages are used. With each new version, they do internal testing to ensure that the virtualized environment remains consistent and compatible with the programming language.