Overview

Attaining connectivity and communications between products and solutions at all levels of the organization remains a challenge for all manufacturers and other industrial enterprises. Given an appropriate business case, most enterprises today are not averse to replacing existing legacy products, systems, and software with new state-of-the art solutions. However, in many cases, rather than wholesale technology replacement, these enterprises will opt to simply add incremental technology, creating the need to connect and establish appropriate ...

It is very easy to get lost in the everyday bits and bytes of the automation environment, but the reality is systems need to stay up and running and everyone within the organization needs to be on the same page.
Time is of the essence and systems need to run at full bore while being functional, safe, secure and profitable. No excuses.

This ARCview addresses the growing need for an enterprise service bus that enables communications and data sharing between plant floor devices and enterprise applications and presents one supplier’s solution.
Kepware Technologies, a developer of communication and interoperability software solutions for the automation industry, recently briefed ARC Advisory Group about the company’s KEPServerEX Communications Platform. This is de-signed to provide enterprise applications with direct, real-time access to machine- and device-level data.

You never know who is watching. Just ask the oil and gas company executives hit by “Night Dragon.”

“Night Dragon” attacks relied on a combination of spear-phishing, social engineering,
Windows bugs and remote administration tools (RATs) to guarantee success. The catch is none of the tactics were particularly sophisticated, said researchers at security software provider McAfee, which uncovered the assault emanating from China and consisting of covert attacks targeting oil, energy and petrochemical companies as ...

A new generation of OPC is upon us. This latest specification is a major step forward in both technology and capability. Called OPC-UA, it starts by unifying the multiple specifications of the past, and redefines the acronym of OPC (formerly OLE for Process Control - a purposeful implementation of certain Microsoft technology) to OPC-UA (now standing for OPen Connectivity - Unified Architecture). Like everything the second time around, the latest generation of OPC-UA delivers solutions to problems ...