Data Access Abroad from PLC/DCS

Hi everyone,


I'm working with a company that is developing software that will be used to access and process sensor data from different process industry instrumentation. The sensors/instruments are connected to a DCS controller/PLC locally, but the software team is in a different country, and needs access to archived and/or live sensor data for testing/development. What would you recommend as the best way to provide this access? Would you recommend using OPC software like Kepware? Or would some type of cloud solution be better?



I also read another recent thread where someone had a programming PC with PLC software connected to a local PLC, then accessed the programming PC remotely over the web. As far as I understand it, they don't need to control anything remotely, just to access the sensor data.



Would greatly appreciate any opinions on this. In case it's relevant, I think they are using ABB DCS, but the controller could be any PLC/DCS controller.

I would be very surprised if your software developers don't have a preferred VPN solution, or several that they can work with to allow for a particular customer's preference.

What is your role in this system ?

Remote access can be as large as a hardware-based VPN solution that allows remote access to the enterprise network (my company uses WatchGuard) or a simple as a small remote access router or a PC running TeamViewer or a similar brokered remote access program.

I'll be working on the automation side, integrating controls hardware, programming the PLCs, etc. From what I've understood so far, they are a bunch of software guys who don't know much about automation equipment and are looking for a solution to get historian and live sensor data from the sensor/controller to a remotely located software team.

If the security (that's the S in IIoT) can be resoloved to everyone's satisfaction, a lot of PLCs have web servers, and coding up a scraper would be trivial for "a bunch of software guys" and might be good enough.


My VERY limited gut feel with PLCs is that they should have the smallest coding footprint in any project to extract data from them - it isn't that they cannot do it, it is rather that it is easier to build a scraper of a web page (or equivalent e.g. OPC/DDE) and code the organizing of the results extra-PLC than it is to have the PLC do any of the data organizing itself. Horses for courses.

The way some industries do this is with a historian network. Each remote site has a historian collecting data, the remote site uses this data for trending/reports/troubleshooting etc... Each remote historian, sends data to a central historian. The data is not live, but is only a few seconds old. In case of network failure the remote historians still collect the data, and send the buffered data once the network is back in service.
I know sites doing this with OSI-PI, but I'm sure there are others out there too. Why re-invent the wheel.

Thank you for the responses.



Ken M thanks for your response. When researching options, I constantly come across newer IIoT type solutions, but since I'm not yet familiar with these technologies, your suggestion on how this is commonly done helps.



Excuse the ignorance here, but do the controllers/devices typically communicate with an OPC-UA server where the historian is located (like KepServer), or is there some other method that is more commonly used now?

I have been using secomea for years with connecting to remote devices, they have a DCM (data collection module) that works with certain cloud servers. I havent presonally used the DCM but looks promising to save a lot of headaches esp from sites abroad

https://www.secomea.com/dcm/