As enterprises in the automation and process industries look to improve productivity and increase uptime, they are more and more turning to Internet-based technologies that allow employees to remotely monitor product performance, diagnose part failures and make repairs. Remote Product Service (RPS) solutions can greatly benefit enterprises in the automation and process industries that need secure remote access to their equipment.

This article examines how RPS solutions can significantly assist enterprises in the automation and process industries to achieve secure and controlled remote access of their automation and process-control network environment. It will explain how RPS solutions allow plant managers to simply, securely and accountably leverage both distributed internal support resources and third-party support services to achieve increased industrial network productivity and performance.

Until recently, industrial plant managers that wanted effective management and maintenance of process-oriented and discrete control systems, required direct human intervention. Examples include:

• Plant technicians making threshold changes to a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC)
• Plant managers monitoring the operator screens of a Distributed Control System (DCS)
• Corporate accountants inquiring about the volume of gas measured in any given month by the pipeline custody transfer system. The accountants need the answer in Remote Terminal Units (RTU) which is monitored by a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system
• Corporate applications experts in Detroit providing technical assistance to plant operators in Australia as they watch their Human Machine Interface (HMI) console
• Third party systems integrators providing Change Management services by checking the current version of firmware and application programming of an intelligent process automation instrument.

Without remote network access, each of these cases requires that someone be physically located where the devices reside in order to track performance, make required modifications, or simply to give proper advice for maintaining operations and productivity.

Fortunately, the advances in the embedded management capabilities of today's automation/process control equipment coupled with the adoption of Industrial Ethernet as the standard has now given plant managers a means to improve productivity and increase uptime. They can accomplish this by leveraging either a centralized or distributed resource pool to monitor and service plant network segments remotely.

Industrial Network Security

Unfortunately, remote access advantages of a "networked" plant environment introduce security risks. Security risks historically were not a major concern before due to the "air-gap" effect where plant networks were completely disconnected from both the corporate LAN and the outside world. Yet by opening production and process control networks to other segments including the Internet, these departments are now exposed to the same virus and security threats that corporate IT departments have been facing for years.

In general, two corporate departments -- IT and Plant Automation -- have important and legitimate needs to own and control remote network access to automation systems. Corporate IT needs to monitor any IP-connected devices and "out-of-band" (e.g. Dial up modem) remote access for regulatory and security concerns. Plant Automation needs to have access to automation systems because they have the application knowledge, the expense budget, the remote support tools, and the sense of urgency to properly diagnose and solve its own problems. Typical conflict entails when Corporate IT wants all networks closed to remote access while Plant Automation wants freedom to remotely connect quickly and simply.

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