Remote Viewing Application
Industrial Remote Viewing applications can be beneficial no matter what your application.
Production Facility
Imagine that you have a single facility and want to add Remote Viewing and Visualization of your process to see what’s happening while you may be anywhere in the world. A remote viewing application can help you better understand what is happening in real time—even while you’re away from the facility. Adding alarming features can even allow you to reduce staff, and allows for viewing of remote facilities. Instead of spending half a day to drive out to a remote site to see which alarm is going off—or to check if a customer is having an issue—you can now just open up the remote viewer and see if the issue warrants a trip to a physical site.
Now that you’ve seen what a remote viewing application can do for you, it’s an easy step from a remote viewer to a SCADA system if you do not have one and/or looking at Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) in order to increase production.
Remote Viewing Applications for OEMs
If you're an OEM, you may want to add Remote Viewing capabilities to all of your equipment for a variety of reasons. Adding visualization to all of your equipment can be a product differentiator to help your customers. Another benefit for OEMs is the collection and aggregation of the data from all of your customers. This can allow you to track usage of all of your equipment to see how it is holding up in the field. It also allows you to use that information to help with your service side of the business. You can figure out which pieces of equipment need service, determine service intervals, and figure out which pieces of equipment need to be serviced immediately.
We Have the Right Remote Viewer For You
Regardless of what your facility looks like, Corso Systems has a Remote Viewer for you. One example is an OEM solution that has been running for a few years—a Golf Course Pump Skid Manufacturer uses Cellular RTUs to transmit the information from any of their facilities to their database. It also provides a unique login for each of their customers to monitor what the individual skids are doing at any time—from anywhere in the world.
What’s a Server?
The fantastic part of a remote viewing application is that the servers containing the information can be anywhere in the world. And you can remotely visualize your process—from a single skid to an entire factory. If you’re using a remote viewing application with a factory, then you probably have a server(s) running already. The remote viewing database can live on one of those servers, or you can set up another server specifically for that data. Additionally, we could even hosting it in the cloud, which is another service that Corso Systems offers.
Determining where the servers are located, and/or if they are hosted in the cloud will depend on how critical the process(es) are and who else needs to use the data. The golf course pump skid manufacturer example uses a Cellular RTU to send the information to the server. So, even if your process is remote, as long as there is cell service, a remote viewing application is still an option for you.
Security for Remote Viewing Applications
Nowadays, everyone is security conscious, and this is very good! The majority of problems we hear about in Industrial settings or even with IoT (Internet of Things), is from old equipment without normal security protocols and/or equipment that was never set-up properly. We will discuss a few standard security issues on this post, but visit our blog for more detailed discussions of security best practices.
First, on a typical application, the remote viewing application is on an IP address that must be typed in exactly for access. Google will not find it, so you have “security by obscurity” working for you. Secondly remote viewing applications are typically for one way viewing. This means that even if someone typed in your exact IP address, they wouldn’t be able to do anything other than look at your process running. Beyond that, we also have the ability to use username and password options, allow only specific IP addresses to access it (so specific phones/homes) or to only allow specific MAC addresses. We can offer viewing just on the network where the facility is located. Additional options include features such as two-factor authentication and more if the process demands it.
Learn More About Remote Viewing Applications
If you're interested in learning more about a Remote Viewing application for your process, please contact us. If you are looking for more options, check out our Process Historian post. And, if you’re looking for more functionality past remote viewing, take a look at our MES guide.