Top 4 Industrial Use Cases for Cloud Computing
4 min read
One of the defining technologies that’s driving Industry 4.0 is cloud computing. While organizations across every vertical can leverage the cloud, manufacturers and other industrialists need to look to direct use cases with a straightforward value proposition and a clear path to ROI.
Cloud computing, simply put, just means renting time on someone else’s computers. Rather than buying hardware, taking the time to set up infrastructure, and paying administrators to maintain it and industrial cybersecurity experts to protect it, we can outsource that work to an industrial cloud services provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Siemens.
You’re a manufacturer, not an IT company. Cloud computing offloads the burden of IT infrastructure onto the experts while giving you more time and money to do what you do best: make a great product.
Ready to get started? These are our top 4 industrial use cases for cloud computing.
#1) Data Dashboards
One of the best places to start is with data dashboards because they’re useful across every level of the organization, from the technicians who need to monitor the plant floor to the executives that are tasked with tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) for high-level strategy. Essentially, you can think of this like a SCADA system in the cloud.
Two of our recommended solutions are MachineMetrics and Samsara. Both of these companies provide fully integrated products, including the sensors to pick up the data, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) gateways that crunch numbers at the edge before sending aggregates to the cloud, and both on-site human machine interfaces (HMIs) and mobile applications for remote monitoring.
These dashboards also enable us to configure alerts and notifications to grab our attention when it matters most. Before cloud computing, setting up a system like this used to be prohibitively expensive for all but the largest manufacturers, but now its become much more accessible.
#2) Storage
You’re already familiar with technologies like Dropbox and Google Drive. We can apply these same principles to industrial data storage to improve redundancy for important documents, to enable remote work forces to seamlessly access data, and to decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with data retention.
One ideal use case is cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. ERP has long been a staple for industry. Cloud ERP is cheaper, more accessible, and often more secure.
Another one of our favorite solutions is the AWS snowball. This is huge for manufacturers who want to migrate to the cloud because it simplifies the entire process. Amazon sends us the hardware, we upload the data and send it back, then they transfer everything into their S3 object storage. This technology is also perfect for remote locations that lack reliable network connectivity.
#3) Machine Learning
It’s no secret that machine learning (ML) is revolutionizing the manufacturing landscape. Companies are building ML models for quality assurance, process optimization, predictive maintenance, and everything in between. However, hiring experienced data scientists and building out an ML model from scratch can be very expensive.
Cloud providers like Amazon make it simpler and easier to leverage ML technology by providing it as a cloud service. For instance, their Panorama service brings computer vision (CV) to on-premises cameras, allowing manufacturers to evaluate manufacturing quality, identify bottlenecks in their processes, and monitor safety and security.
Another great option is Monitron, which allows AWS customers to leverage the same technology that AWS uses in their own fulfillment centers for anomaly detection and predictive maintenance. Basically, this lets us monitor our machinery so that we know about failures before they happen. This lets us fix it ahead of time and reduce unplanned downtime, which directly translates to more stable revenue streams. We can monitor and detect potential failures in motors, gearboxes, pumps, fans, bearings, compressors, and more.
#4) Virtualization
Instead of having to maintain your own servers, let the experts do it. A major advantage of this approach is that we can easily provision any operating system that we need through virtualization. Of course we can access all the options we’d expect, including Windows 10 and many Linux distributions, but one of the main draws for manufacturers is that we can also provision legacy operating systems.
Many industrialists still utilize software that only works on old systems, and so they’re forced to retain machines running OSes like Windows 7 or Windows XP. Not only is this a huge liability in security, but maintaining these legacy systems is a serious challenge. Running them on the cloud, however, is as simple as clicking a button.
Another attractive option is browser-based SCADA software, such as Ignition SCADA by Inductive Automation. This lets us web-launch clients to any device with a web-browser, making it so that we can use any device that we want to access our SCADA system.
Conclusion
Cloud computing offers many advantages for manufacturers. A main draw is its decentralized architecture: instead of having everything on one server in the closet, our IT infrastructure is spread across multiple machines or even multiple data centers. If one thing goes down, the whole system doesn’t have to.
We should also keep hybrid cloud in mind, which involves splitting the computing environment between on-premises machines and the cloud. Many manufacturers choose to keep mission-critical processes or particularly sensitive data on their internal networks while offloading less essential or private tasks to cloud providers. This approach really gives us the best of both worlds.
If you’re ready to start your journey to the cloud, Outlier Automation can help you get there. Contact us today for a free consultation.