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Gathering Clouds: A Roadmap to Industrial Cloud Data Collection

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Manufacturing produces more than products. Every robot, every machine, every operation is a gamut of data flush with opportunity. Looking to optimize your manufacturing process? No problem – performance data from your tooling can help manufacturing engineers sniff out bottlenecks.

Is downtime a headache? Collating metrics on operating temperatures, power draw, and more can predict anomalies long before they morph into contingencies. Perhaps your factory needs to reduce emissions? Machine data collection lets you know which devices can be turned off without harming productivity. The unmined value of data collection to industries is evident, as is the need to store industrial data in an accessible, secure, user-friendly platform.

The Perks of Cloud Collection

Cloud computing makes retrieving machine data manageable without erecting an entire data center. By distributing processing and storage resources across multiple machines, modern cloud services support everything from GoogleSuite services to sustainable forestry. Manufacturers and machine operators benefit by keeping their heads in the clouds; off-site data vastly simplifies data recovery in the event of catastrophic system failures.

Specialized industrial cloud data collection tools, such as Secomea’s DCC (Data Collection Cloud), enhance utility further by enabling customizable real-time presentation of data from the cloud in intuitive dashboards.

The Data Collection Cloud from Secomea

DCC empowers companies by transcribing confusing information in human-digestible formats. As machine data in its raw format can be rather unfriendly to the eye, DCC allows companies to turn their OEE metrics into intuitive displays. Customizable gauges and graphs allow for real-time updates on the factory floor, from anywhere in the world. Gauges are exceptionally convenient for comparing the operational performance of one device to another, making qualitative operational analytics accessible to even the untrained eye. Intuitive comparisons are important for faultfinding problems quickly – seconds count when preventing a manufacturing mishap.

There’s a famous adage in the cybersecurity community – “There is no cloud, only other people’s computers”. To translate from idiom into English, some cloud storage solutions offer users marginal control of data flow in and out of the cloud. Fortunately, DCC gives manufacturers total control. By feeding machine data to DCC through a TLS VPN connection from Secomea’s SiteManager industrial IoT gateway, all initial points are thoroughly secured. Endpoints are just as accountable – to access DCC’s data, users must be approved through Secomea’s GateManager secure access management solution. With unparalleled security, scalability, and usability, it’s no wonder manufacturers embrace cloud data solutions like DCC.

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