A leading oil & gas process control network provider wanted to provide process control network as-a-Service to its refinery customers. To do that, they needed to securely connect the process control network in the refinery so that their technicians could remotely monitor the plant performance of the refinery. Their existing solution to establish secure remote connectivity to achieve this was labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive and complex. The deployment complexities included:

• Truck rolls to each refinery site
• Acquiring, installing and configuring routers, VPN concentrators and firewalls on-prem at each plant
• IT overhead for maintaining and managing these routers, firewalls and VPN concentrators
• Provisioning and managing multiple VPNs from multiple operators
• Managing usernames, passwords or keys for all these VPNs
• Requesting customer’s IT department to punch holes to allow remote access
• Installing on-prem at each site the required protocol converters and additional software agents for each managed subsystem (gas monitor, valve sensor, etc).

Using ioTium’s, the customer established a simplified unified architecture applicable across their portfolio of refineries to securely connect the process control network in the refinery in minutes. The benefits of using OT-Net include a seamless plug & play architecture with:

• No truck rolls
• No need for onsite IT resources
• No changes to refiner site’s security/firewall posture
• No CLI (command line interface)
• No APN/VPN
• No usernames & passwords
• No manual configuration of protocol software adapters

ioTium abstracted out all the deployment complexities and addressed the security vulnerabilities to enable zero-touch provisioned, cloud-managed secure remote connectivity at scale, resulting in fast time to market, significant savings in network infrastructure OPEX, and significantly enhanced security.

Leading manufacturers of upstream and midstream oil & gas equipment (pump jack, artificial lift, etc) wanted to run equipment health monitoring and optimization applications at the equipment itself across their equipment portfolio. However, their existing solution to deploy edge applications was labor-intensive, time consuming, expensive and complex, and had security vulnerabilities. The deployment complexities included:

• Truck rolls to each site
• Acquiring, installing and configuring routers, VPN concentrators and firewalls on-prem at each plant
• IT overhead for maintaining and managing these routers, firewalls and VPN concentrators
• Installing app for each equipment on-site
• Managing additional hardware to run VPN concentrator and firewall
• Provisioning and managing multiple VPNs from multiple operators
• Managing usernames, passwords or keys for all these VPNs
• Requesting customer’s IT department to punch holes to allow remote access
• Installing on-prem at each site the required protocol converters and additional software agents for each managed subsystem (reciprocating compressor, load cell sensor, etc)
• Managing/updating/upgrading applications one site at a time on-site

Using ioTium, the customers were able to deploy equipment health monitoring and optimization applications at the edge across their entire equipment portfolio in one-click from ioTium’s centralized cloud-based Orchestrator. The benefits of using OT-Edge Edge-Cloud Infrastructure include one-click cloud-enabled deployment, provisioning and managing of edge applications at scale, and a seamless plug & play architecture with:

• No truck rolls
• No need for onsite IT resources
• No changes to existing enterprise security/firewall/proxy settings
• No CLI (command line interface)
• No APN/VPN
• No usernames & passwords
• No on-site configuration of protocol software adapters
• No on-site installation of edge apps
• No on-site update/upgrade of edge apps
• Ability to securely deploy and run additional containerized apps on the same hardware in isolation from each other
• No vendor lock-in, enabling flexibility to move to any cloud and any application at the edge, and eliminating the need for fixed-function edge device

ioTium abstracted out all the deployment complexities and addressed security issues to enable one-click cloud-enabled deployment of applications at the equipment at scale. Thus, enabling real-time analytics on time-sensitive data that continued to remain local within the customer’s industrial networks. The solution resulted in significant cost savings in provisioning and recurring application management OPEX, fast time to market and significantly enhanced security.

Large oil & gas companies wanted to enable secure third-party remote access for their vendors and technicians into their respective upstream assets globally. Their existing identity and access management solution was complex, expensive and time-consuming to deploy and manage, and did not provide them sufficient control over which vendors were accessing which subsystems and touching which applications across their assets globally.

Using ioTium, the customers were able to provision, authenticate, manage and audit which vendors were accessing which subsystem and touching which applications across their global assets, all through a single pane of glass. ioTium’s fully managed OT-Access solution enabled them to simply plug and go while ioTium’s service did all the heavy lifting required to provision and configure secure remote access. Further, ioTium’s solution eliminated the need to download and install software clients/agents by third-party remote users, and significantly enhanced security by shielding the customers’ mission-critical assets from the public Internet.