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How to share PLC data securely
The first challenge you face when talking about ‘enterprise wide’ data sharing is how to establish data connectivity with all your controllers, such as PLCs, at the control level. Running a close second is the questions of how to share this data with the rest of the company while ensuring that appropriate levels of access are granted only to the right people. And finally, from a maintenance and future upgrade/migration perspective, it is worth considering how much work will be required to install and configure the various connectors as your company continues using legacy systems, buys new controllers, and upgrades others.
While the first challenge is easily answered by using OPC, the de facto standard for exchanging data between virtually any data source and data user (client) – the question of secure access, ease of installation and ongoing-maintenance is strongly dependent on the OPC vendor you choose.
Why? Because OPC only specifies the messaging OPC Servers and OPC Clients use to exchange data requests and updates – but does not force the implementations to do so securely from an OPC context. As a result, most OPC Servers expose your data to OPC Clients but very few give you control over who gets access to what data.
As it turns out, there is a simple solution that supports the best scenario: having a single OPC server that not only provides you with connectivity to all your PLCs via plug-ins but also implements complete OPC Security down to the per-user-per-tag level. This allows you to confidently provide data access to those who need it without worrying about accidental or malicious writes or loss of confidentiality. In addition, configuration and maintenance are a snap because all the plug-ins use a common OPC Server framework. The name of this OPC Server is the MatrikonOPC Universal Connectivity Server for PLCs.
Download a fully functional trial today and discover the easiest way to access your PLC data securely!
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