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.
ioTium, A Cool Vendor For Edge Management