No Code Integration of REST/JSON/Webservices with OPC

Summary

The exchange of data between OT systems or between OT and IT or business systems plays a pivotal role in ensuring efficient and robust industrial operations. Digital transformation initiatives demand rapid information exchange while ensuring security. Historically, solutions to these challenges are a landscape of custom software applications. Workforce capacity limitations demand solutions that are sustainable over time without the use of custom software code.

In this article, we will explore the both secure movement of data and bidirectionally transforming data from web services typically used in IT & business applications to the OPC protocols found in OT applications, without writing custom code.
 

Secure data movement

In the industrial control space, it’s common for an engineer to ask IT to open a port on a firewall, router, or other network device to connect between certain systems and/or control devices. We’re not just talking to the public internet, but even between network segments such as control and business networks. It’s also common for the IT department to have serious concerns about security risks potentially introduced to all the company’s networks by opening a port. This often leads to difficult conversations, which we find are becoming more difficult and require balancing different priorities and perspectives.

We’ve spent 27 years in the operations technology (OT) space but because we work in data integration with our end user, integrator and machine builder partners, we must understand IT concepts and concerns. Software Toolbox has a variety of resources available to aid in understanding the challenges and off-the-shelf software products to empower meeting the needs while remaining secure.

These conversations used to focus on the issue of opening ports and limiting access to certain sources, or securing communications via VPNs. Modern threats have rendered those solutions inadequate. Our clients are telling us they now must navigate DMZs and proxy servers and do so without the software managing the OT/IT movement adding significant latencies. They also want the software used to handle IoT protocols such as MQTT/Sparkplug, OPC and more. 

The most sophisticated users are setting up configurations where connections are reversed and the most at risk networks only push data up as shown below. If they allow bidirectional flow, they want the tunnels or channels of reads and writes separated, all while employing encryption and other security measures. Software Toolbox’s team is helping user around the world solve these problems with the Cogent DataHub.



You can learn more about why VPNs and port management isn’t sufficient, and see a video demonstration using the links below.

• Firewall Ports: There's More to It and Why Your IT Team Has Concerns
• Moving OT data without opening inbound firewall ports
• Video Tutorial – Secure Data Tunneling

Once you have secured the data transmission, you must handle the fact that OT and IT speak different languages.
 

Data transformation

For decades, one of the approaches to storing and exchanging data was through CSV files, enabling businesses to maintain data in a tabular format. Although CSV remains a viable solution for data storage and exchange, the advent of the Cloud IoT (Internet of Things) era has introduced alternative, more straightforward formats for data storage, such as JSON.

JSON is a JavaScript-based standard used for transmission of structured data via the internet. JSON is often used as value or parameter input or output. JSON is a valuable exchange format between web clients and backend services. JSON offers several key advantages over CSV, including support for larger file sizes, handling hierarchical and relational data, seamless integration with APIs, scalability and optimal performance when dealing with extensive and complex datasets.

Many solutions for JSON interchange of data require users to write code and deeply understand JSON expressions and other details. Solutions that don’t use code, provided they are flexible enough, are inherently more sustainable and have a lower cost of ownership.

Off-the-shelf solutions have emerged that managed data acquired from OT systems via OPC DA or UA and visually transform it into JSON files that seamlessly interface with destination systems like InfluxDB, MQTT Brokers/Clients and REST Webservices, thereby harnessing the benefits of this powerful data format with out the risks and long-term costs of custom code.

OPC Router is one of these solutions. The off-the-shelf software product uses a visual workflow engine and connectors to integrate OT protocols, IoT systems, cloud systems and ERP systems including native SAP connectors. Implementers can visually create workflows to map, transform data and trigger movement, then templatize them and use mass configuration tools in the software to scale up their configurations. Solutions can be deployed in Docker containers on Linux edge devices or Windows systems to meet a variety of solution architectures.

You can learn more in our detailed tutorial referenced at the end of this article, but in the example below, we have used OPC Router’s transfer objects to connect an OPC UA Server and then map the data to the OPC Router JSON Write transfer object. Although in this application, we write a file, the same dataset could be served up in a RESTful web service. The solution could also be reversed to consume data as a RESTful web client from a web service, and then deliver it to an OPC server. OPC Router also supports ETL tools for XML and CSV, all without writing any code.



To learn more or to request a free consult, visit the OPC Router Website, Contact Us, or access the detailed how to resources below.

• OPC Router Quick Start & Application Guides
• Consuming OPC UA data and generating JSON datasets
• Video Training Tutorial Connecting RESTful Web Services to OPC UA & OPC DA

Conclusions

OT/IT/Business data interchange requires consideration of the security of data transport, and then the needs to transform the data between formats, all without the use of custom software and code. Software Toolbox provides off-the-shelf solutions combined with the expertise to support users, integrators and OEMs in their implementations.