Be Always Ready

Availability is a way to measure the robustness of a system, obtained by the ratio between the time it is running divided by the total time it could have been running. A crucial measure for businesses: if the systems do not work, you do not produce, you do not generate value, and you endanger the viability of the company.

Unscheduled stoppages have a higher cost than perceived, not exclusively due to direct costs, but also due to indirect costs: loss of income, penalties, repairs, loss of productivity, decrease in OEE, loss of quality, loss of raw materials, damage to image or reputation, etc.

The Be Always Ready layer, which encompasses the company’s entire OT environment, groups hardware/software solutions to guarantee the continuity of operations and achieve a high level of availability of the systems involved.

Have You ever Wondered…

How do we ensure that PLCs are executing the appropriate process logics?
Or that a hardware failure does not leave us without process data?
How do we prevent problems from going unnoticed?
How do we guarantee high availability in communications?
How do we control the environmental surroundings of the equipment?
And the physical access to the assets?
Any unanswered question is a potential risk of losing availability of plant assets.

How Can You Take Advantage of be Always Ready Solutions to Increase your Availability?

• With resilient and robust equipment: something that reduces the probability of failure and, by definition, makes them more available. In parallel, equipment that can recover quickly and self-repair is another way to increase overall availability, regardless of whether they break down often.
• Implementing backups and recovery: robustness is not enough in many cases in which, in addition, it is necessary to worry about the integrity and protection of the data. Companies that take more holistic approaches to availability back up regularly to recover in the event of disasters.
  Configuring copy and recovery systems requires certain IT skills. Recovery time can vary between hours and days, depending on the applications and amount of data to recover.
• Clusters, virtualization, and balancing/failover services: when shutdown costs are high, any hour penalizes, and a lot. Clusters and failover systems use the same principle as backups, with the addition that they perform certain actions in advance, such as replicating data and/or systems between duplicate equipment. In this way, they significantly reduce recovery time.