Are Industrial Solutions Ready for the Cloud?

Following the post “How can Cloud solutions help the Industry?”, it is necessary to ask the question Are Industrial Solutions ready for the Cloud?.
The answer to this question allows us to identify which solutions we can take to the Cloud to benefit from its services.

If we focus on the OMS/MOM (Operations Management Systems/Manufacturing Operations Management) environment composed of solutions such as HMI, DCS, SCADA, MES, MIS (Manufacturing Information Systems), RTOM (Real-Time Operations Management), we can differentiate them according to their latency and criticality.

By latency, we refer to real-time events versus transactional events, while by criticality, we refer to the impact of these solutions on production systems, both in terms of security and financial aspects. From this differentiation, we extract the following graph, where the industrial solutions that can be hosted in the Cloud are observed.

It is worth noting that solutions considered to have fast latency and greater criticality, such as HMI, SCADA, Process History, Alarm Management, MES and Security solutions, must usually be installed locally.

As a general rule, anything directly related to or connected to an output of the production process should be installed locally. Anything that is not critical to the production process, but is complementary or helps those that are, is a candidate to be hosted in the Cloud. The following table shows the typical needs of the industry that can be covered by cloud-ready solutions.