HMI in the Sky

Dan Hebert is a Senior Technical Editor for CONTROL, Control Design, and Industrial Networking magazines. He began his career at Putman Media as a Field Editor in 1995 and joined the company on a full-time basis in 2000.Vipond Controls is a system integrator in Calgary, Alberta. The company provides a cloud-based SCADA solution based on InduSoft's Web Studio software to its customers in the oil and gas industry.

Rather than purchasing and installing SCADA software and hardware at each remote site, customers instead rely on Vipond.

A typical installation consists of one or more controllers and/or remote terminal units at a remote production site such as an oil well, explains Darryl Vipond, president of Vipond Controls. Each of these local devices is connected to the cloud-based iSCADA via radio, cellular or satellite connections. No SCADA hardware or software is required at the site as the iSCADA solution provides this functionality remotely.

Source: Vipond Controls

Once the data is uploaded to the iSCADA application in the cloud, it's available for remote access. "A key feature of iSCADA is the very fast response rates, which enable us to deliver a remote HMI experience in near real time," Vipond says. "This remote viewing can be delivered through any web browser, a PC set up as a thin client, or a smartphone such as the iPhone and certain Android phones."

Vipond adds, "Our SCADA solution creates a unique experience for each client. With iSCADA, each customer has its own virtual machine running within Vipond's server cloud. All data is kept safe and independent of other machines running in the cloud."