Articles and News

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com The automation industry lost a dedicated and creative professional in Dr. Kenneth (Ken) Ryan, who died in July. Ken was an amazing man with a wide scope of knowledge and interests that he enthusiastically pursued.

By Kim Del Fierro, Area 1 Security Cybersecurity is an issue that is now demanding more attention than ever. Due to the frequency and devastating consequences of cyberattacks, every employee should be able to maintain a high level of cyberattack prevention.

Tree Topology concentrates the connection of several field devices to couplers/junction boxes. Tree topology is also known as "Chickenfoot" or "Star" configuration.

With this partnership, AVEVA customers gain access to in-memory cyber protection for Industrial Control (ICS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.

By Albert Behr, Behr Technologies Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) will soon become the standard IIoT communications infrastructure covering the entire industrial facility and supporting a multitude of uses cases, from simple temperature monitoring in the manufacturing plant to condition monitoring, energy consumption tracking, and worker safety.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com Throughout the four-day event, which hosted over 21,000 attendees from more than 100 countries, it was obvious that SAP is focused on growing its role to encompass all manufacturing functions outside of design and hard real-time control.

By Jonathan Wilkins, EU Automation As cryptocurrencies become more popular, their creators are vying for new customers. This article explains how blockchain and the Tangle differ and what both can do to improve manufacturing practice.

The event took place from June 10 to 15 in San Diego and featured over 300 hundred hours of training and knowledge sharing. Attendees joined hands-on labs, technical sessions and management discussions to learn about the latest techniques and technologies to optimize production data, build secure networks and accelerate a digital transformation.

Used to secure billions of computer hardware and financial systems, TPM technology uses a secret key embedded into a microchip or firmware.

The International Society of Automation and The Open Group have agreed to a liaison Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to facilitate cooperation in advancing and harmonizing the development of a multivendor, interoperable, secure control architecture for application across the process industries. Activities will include sharing of best practices, document review and joint forums.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com Featuring numerous displays of the newest technologies, along with dozens of Honeywell and customer led sessions and technical discussions, the Honeywell Users Group Americas (HUG) buzzed in San Antonio this June with over 1,300 attendees.

Nano-satellite narrowband services to the Caribbean region will be provided by SAS' Pearls constellation once deployment commences in 2019. This supports the SAS business model of providing connectivity to equatorial locations such as the Caribbean, where these services are required.

By Jonathan Wikins, EU Automation Whether you’re working from home, picking up e-mails on the go or away on business, it’s usually possible to remotely access you company’s network. This article discusses secure remote access and the challenges it presents.

By Robert Landavazo, Tripwire The OT/IT convergence will no doubt be looked back upon as a turning point in industry’s fight for cyber security and further harnessing of technology for business success. Being an early, proactive leader in that regard certainly, in general, seems like a good role to be playing.

Since no single technology provider can enable IIoT alone, this joint effort will provide a mass-market, end-to-end wireless gateway solution to ensure connectivity with sensors for production-level industrial and commercial applications.

Seeq has secured $23M in Series B funding led by the Altira Group with participation by Chevron Technology Ventures, next47, the Siemens-backed global venture firm, Second Avenue Partners and other existing investors.

In addition to Subramanian’s role as director of manufacturing cybersecurity for DMDII, Subramanian also will serve as chief information security officer for UI LABS, DMDII’s parent organization, which is driving the digital future of manufacturing and cities.

The whitepaper, Chapter Five: Industrial Control Systems Life Cycle Cost Analysis – Quantitative Evaluation, delineates 450 different factors that impact costs across the following six phases of the industrial control system (ICS) life cycle: engineering, installation, commissioning, maintenance, system, and cyber security.

By Bill Lydon, Editor, Automation.com Much like the Fieldbus wars that marked the industrial automation industry of the 1990’s, there are early-warning signs of competing standards developing in TSN activity that could ignite a similar wave of chaos.

By Tom Ayral, Honeywell Cyber Security Various industry studies and intelligent guess-work already allow us to develop a first-pass financial estimate of potential losses from cyber attacks – which allows an estimate of the savings that implementing an effective cyber security program could bring.