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Emerson Users Exchange meeting • Industrial plant computing on the cloud • Making analytics less confusing • Standardise to decarbonise Intelie - analytics for drilling Using unstructured data to reduce downtime May - June 2021 • Keeping hackers out of mobile apps • Working with vessel performance data • Blockchain for seismic, ESG, JVs and transport Official publication of Finding Petroleum Emerson Emerson Moving industrial plant computing to the cloud Much of the systems and data for managing industrial plant are about to be moved from ‘on premise’ to the cloud, reckons Emerson’s Peter Zornio. It will be a ‘platform change’ as big as the move from workstations to ‘Wintel’ in the mid 1990s Cloud for plant operations is “potentially a this direction, using cloud ever since.” Issue 90 May - June 2021 big platform change that will impact us in the world of operations technology and auto- OT and IT mation,” said Peter Zornio, Chief Technology Digital Energy Journal Much of the drive to move plant systems to Officer with Emerson Automation. United House, North Road, the cloud is coming from IT staff, who are in- London, N7 9DP, UK Mr Zornio envisages that automation systems creasingly getting involved in the operations www.d-e-j.com will go through a platform change similar to technology (OT) world, and are already com- Tel +44 (0)208 150 5292 the way mainstream computing went from fortable running everything on the cloud, he mainframes to workstations, and from work- said. Editor and Publisher stations to PCs. When automation systems did the transition Karl Jeffery [email protected] “The problem with a mainframe was when to Windows in the 1990s, it meant the OT and Tel +44 208 150 5292 you ran out of horsepower you had to get an- IT worlds were using the same platform – and other mainframe. Everybody dreamed, ‘if I opened up many years of discussions about Advertising sales: could just have my own computer, so I don’t whose ‘domain’ it was. David Jeffries, Only Media Ltd have to share with other people.’” “IT guys looked at a lot of automation equip- [email protected] “Of course, that happened,” he says, when ment and thought, it looks like the same stuff Tel +44 208 150 5293 we moved from mainframes to UNIX work- we use, we should be owning that,” Mr Zor- stations in the engineering world. Everybody nio said. Production could have their own computer, although its But since then, most companies have been Very Vermilion Ltd. processing was done on a central machine. www.veryvermilion.co.uk keeping the OT world separate to the IT Then in the mid-90s, there was a move to world, having it on separate networks or Windows operating systems on Intel com- using firewalls. “Systems were connected but Subscriptions: £250 for personal subscription, £795 for puting infrastructure, what people now call weren’t really integrated.” corporate subscription. ‘Wintel’. Emerson tried to provide people in the OT E-mail: [email protected] “That started a computing environment that world with pre-configured equipment, so they has been with us ever since,” Mr Zornio said. did not have the complexities of running IT “It is still the standard computing environ- systems. ment for the automation world and the IT “There was a long time of “peaceful co-exist- world.” ence”. OK IT guys, here’s your data, now ‘Wintel’ computers have been used for the leave us alone, we want to run our environ- past 2 decades, both for personal computers ment.” and for servers, handling e-mail and enter- In the domain of life science, there has been prise software. more integration between IT and OT, he The first commercial cloud services, launched said. Perhaps life sciences has been the most around 2010, were “rent a data centre”, en- aggressive in moving IT technology to the abling people to avoid the capital expense of manufacturing world. having to operate their own. You would run But today, “digital transformation” programs the same software applications in someone are pushing IT people to get more involved in Cover photo: Cyberhawk, which claims to be the else’s data centre, Mr Zornio said. the OT world in all industry sectors. global leader in drone and software solutions for energy assets, increased turnover by more than “It was like “Nearly everyone we serve has some kind 50 per cent in 2020 and increased headcount by a big virtual of digital transformation program going on. almost 100 per cent. See www.thecyberhawk.com mainframe in Many times it’s run by the IT department, the sky, but sometimes OT and engineering groups.” infinitely scal- able.” Many digital transformation programs have forced a much tighter integration between IT “The IT de- and OT, such as projects delivering data to partments of mobile devices, augmented reality, and bring- the world, ing in third party connected services. once they saw the advantage And as IT people have influence on the OT of moving in world, they are bringing in their preferences this direction, – including for cloud technology. Peter Zornio, Chief Technology Of- have been ac- “We see IT departments directly tackling ficer with Emerson Automation celerating in 2 digital energy journal - May - June 2021 Emerson Emerson operations problems by pulling in data, running The automation world is different. The vast ma- streaming data, but now we have buildings, machine learning, trying to solve some of the jority of Emerson customers “want to have the farms, car parks, and cities steaming sensor problems that OT departments have been trying ability for plants to continue to operate without data, who want a way to store and analyse it. to solve for quite a while.” the cloud. If they lose the internet connection Companies like Microsoft and IBM “want to they can still reliably run their plant.” Although you normally need a domain expert, build things that go across all the markets, not someone who understands the process, to solve So perhaps what we will see is production just manufacturing and industrial,” Mr Zornio a problem. “A data scientist sometimes comes plants having a core system on site which runs said. up with some, quite frankly, silly conclusions the plant, including sensors, control systems or things which are obvious to people in the and visualisations, and everything else going Security plant. But the combination of the two does en- to the cloud, he said. Some people raise concerns over security of able solving new problems.” Other issues to consider are whether you like cloud data, “but many people will argue that Some business now have single teams looking the low capital requirements of cloud software, cloud vendors have more time, money and after both IT and OT. Probably all companies how much technical depth you have in your or- people to put into security than any one com- will go in this direction eventually, as “one in- ganisation, and how well your organisation is pany does.” tegrated computing team.” able to adopt change. “This is all they do - store data. They have OT and IT typically work on different time Some companies have a specific policy to try hundreds of the best people working on sec- scales, where OT people are used to keep- to get rid of all their IT hardware and go 100 urity. It’s not perfect, but they probably have ing equipment running until it fails, where IT per cent cloud. more resources to apply than any one company people are used to implementing new software would do.” Data tools all the time. One way is to set things up so data from the OT By merging IT and OT, you can get much more There are increasingly sophisticated data tools world can only go one way, like a “data diode”. IT capabilities in the OT world – such as wire- available on the cloud, and this strengthens Data can come out, but bad things can’t get in. less communications in the field, data analytics the argument for using cloud software. It is no in the cloud, and more data storage capability. longer just about renting computers, it can be Emerson about renting an operating system, including If you want cloud hosted services, “by def- Emerson has partnered with Microsoft’s Azure capability for data storage and data analytics, inition you have to have IT guys involved as its preferred cloud provider – and about 15 Mr Zornio said. - they’re going to want to know about data pri- different Emerson solutions are available on vacy rules, where data is stored.” Cloud providers are acting more like software Azure as “software as a service”. companies (or software companies are becom- Emerson has software called “Plantweb Optics On premise vs cloud ing cloud providers). Data Lake”, which can connect to data streams This leads to the question of which software For example Microsoft offers tools to “virtual- from sensors, stream the data to the cloud, and systems should still be kept on premise, if you ise” data via a cloud service (show data from “historize” (store) it. are moving much of it to the cloud. multiple sources as though it came from the This saves operations technology people from same data store). The operations technology world has tradition- the trouble of working out the best way to con- ally run everything on premise. It makes sense There’s still a lot of work you have to do nect sensors to cloud systems. This can be very when you are talking about software which ac- yourself to turn that into a real application. IT tough in some circumstances, such as where tually runs equipment.