Overview

Companies whose business relies heavily on high value assets and machines, such as packaging machines, CNC machines, industrial printers, and robots, are being pushed to innovate in an increasingly competitive environment. Addressing these business demands requires plug-and-play integration into digital transformation, and cloud infrastructures. Through these integrations, they can enhance their own company’s profitability, product reliability, service levels, and possibly introduce new “asset as a service” business models.

Many of these initiatives include building remote and predictive analytics around equipment use and health. These initiatives require historical and real-time data from sensors, field buses, PLCs, and logs to be seamlessly standardized, cleaned and sent to the cloud. There, the data can be leveraged to generate powerful insights into device’s status and create predictive algorithms that help customers optimize uptime, improve scheduling, and reduce costs.

Image and video analysis, including AI-based technologies, are being leveraged to optimize plant activities. As these technologies make their way to the industrial floor, there is a growing demand for enhanced compute power.

With all the envisioned business benefits, the digitalization of edge assets is not without its challenges. Solutions are required that allow the machine manufacturer to extend its value proposition to the market while keeping the requirements at a minimum, especially with regards to the necessary skills to design, deploy, scale, and maintain the IoT solution. Mitigating risk, especially from a security perspective, and ensuring lowest TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) with full remote and lifecycle management, are essential to meet the envisioned business benefits.

Opportunity

Industrial manufacturing is undergoing a rapid evolution. With the rapid adoption of Cloud services, advancements in IoT technologies, powerful analytics, and even AI, companies with a business relying on high value assets have an unprecedented opportunity to gain the cutting edge.

While investigating different options for making data from field assets (devices, PLCs, field busses, sensors, actuators, etc.) readily and easily available on AWS for 56k.Cloud customers, some requirements became very obvious. The need for a Multi-service, Compact and Expandable IoT Edge computing family of integrated hardware & software products (IoT Gateways, IPCs, Edge Servers & Edge AI systems), capable of satisfying the requirements of a variety of customer scenarios. These range from industrial automation to energy & utilities to mobile applications (transportation).

The largest barrier these manufacturers face is to create a truly future-proof IoT foundation that marries robust security with real-time connectivity and full device management. Once implemented, this foundation will allow manufacturers to develop and launch a myriad of new capabilities and services such as remote asset management, digital twins, predictive maintenance, and edge AI.

Solution

56K.Cloud enables customers to build on public cloud technologies and accelerate their development practices. With the addition of Cloud-enabled products of Eurotech, following a cloud-native IT strategy, Cloud IoT has become a central pillar of 56k.Cloud’s offering.

Eurotech has taken 30 years of edge computing experience and paired it with AWS’s industry leading IoT solutions to give customers a plug-and-play platform for true, holistic digital transformation. In short: industrial-grade ReliaGATE IoT Gateways or ReliaCOR Edge Servers, incorporating a complete IoT software stack (managed Linux operating system and IoT Edge Application Framework and integration with both AWS IoT Core / AWS IoT Greengrass), maintenance, control, and supply strategies. Everyware Cloud (EC), is used to ensure extended health monitoring and data logging as well as remote and full lifecycle management of the edge devices.

Ensuring an appropriate level of security (edge and IoT infrastructure) is one of the toughest challenges manufacturers and users of connected assets / machines face. Governments and other political and industrial organizations demand higher levels of security. Demanding security frameworks and certifications (i.e., IEC 62443 or NIST CSF) do provide solid guidance, but this level of security is nearly impossible to implement as an afterthought – edge devices must be designed to meet these stringent security requirements (i.e., Hardware root of trust, zero trust architecture, secure boot, etc.). Mastering these security requirements are the foundation for secure asset / device onboarding at scale or ZTP (Zero Touch Provisioning).

Outcome

• Higher operational efficiency and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), a core benefit of a solid IoT implementation.
• React in real-time to asset status and performance insights, allowing equipment manufacturers to optimize service schedules and improve service levels.
• Predict when supplies and maintenance service will be required.
• Reduction of time 70% for developing & implementing a suitable edge architecture & functionality towards local field buses.
• A “security baseline” as defined in IEC 62443-4-2 L2 reduces the efforts to secure the application, another win with 50% of time won back.

This meant 56k Cloud could focus more on customer outcome, providing value-added integration, supporting the migration and a fast, successful project delivery. A time reduction of over 70-80% was achieved already with the implementation of the Universal Gateway with pre-integrated field protocols (S7, Modbus, OPC-UA, DNP3, IEC 60870, M-bus, IEC 61850, LoRa, MQTT, BLE, etc.). This allowed to achieve at the edge a “security baseline” as defined in IEC 62443-4-2 L2 directive. Resulting in a significant amount of time and money, close to 50% of total projected cost.