Using IoT for Remote Monitoring of Industrial Systems

Recent events are bound to resurrect the subject of remote monitoring geographically distributed industrial systems. With sudden disruptions and even inability to effectively serve them, ongoing continuous monitoring suddenly looks like a great investment. The problem is how expensive that investment can be. Many industrial systems lack built in monitoring or have dated versions that report alarms when things have stopped functioning instead of continuously providing operational information. Customized remote monitoring systems from major industrial equipment and systems suppliers can also be expensive, both to procure and implement. Often, these legacy systems also come from the industrial control and monitoring world and depend on industrial networks and protocols that can be hard to implement remotely. What to do?

Building Overlay Monitoring Solutions using Industrial IoT components and cloud computing solutions not only solves most of these problems but opens the door to advanced data collection, analytics, machine learning and even AI. After being connected with the monitored system at the edge, these systems can be quickly deployed, complete with monitoring, management, analytics and messaging applications. Being cloud based, they are completely scalable, cost effective (cloud computing) and use web/mobile applications that can be integrated at the web/API level with existing company systems.

Overlay IoT solutions are built on top of existing solutions and connected at the edge, eliminating the need to integrate with existing systems and systems technologies. They can use their own connectivity technologies like VPNs or cellular as they connect to the cloud, reducing security risks and industrial network design issues. Connected at the edge using gateways with serial or GPIO interfaces they incorporate edge processing where data filtering, event processing and machine learning can be used to understand and model the behavior of each system, bringing new insights and understanding of how each system operates. Finally, utilizing market leading cloud based IoT offering from AWS, they come with ready to deploy applications for data/event monitoring, analytics, administration/provisioning and solution monitoring as well as cloud-based data processing, storage, application hosting for web/mobile apps, integrated messaging and advanced tools for data mining and AI.

Using cloud-based Overlay IoT Solutions for Monitoring Industrial Systems offer many advantages:

• Fast Deployment (using deployable Industrial Monitoring Solution)
• Low Integration Costs (with existing systems/processes)
• Operational Understanding (the power of data)

Use cases range from monitoring of simple industrial systems (pump stations, elevators, HVAC) to complex systems (pollution monitoring, manufacturing operations, processing operations).

Let us show you how easy and cost effective deploying a remote monitoring IoT system can be.