alt Hacker NewsYes. Without a remote system you must have a real person check levels, pumps, pressures, and many other devices thus be present. This person must be trained and you will likely need a backup as well.
If not a person you need more redundancies built in. Bigger tanks, multiple backup systems. When items start failing you need them to be shutoff in a timely manner. Water pumps at these facilities are in the 50-100k range. When it starts failing you want to know.
Think of it like driving a car and it starts making funny noises. The longer you wait to fix it the more it costs.
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Surely it isn't impossible to devise one-way data flows that provably work for remote sensing? And yeah then you have to send somebody to fix stuff if something is off..
Like something that would work but not not scale would be one computer writing data to an updating qr code and another reading it. Surely something like that can be made (and probably already exists?) on the cable level?
This smells wrong to me. You already have people working at the water treatment plant. You don’t need it connected to the internet?
Why that drastic, checking system state (telemetry) can be done using 'data diode' style networking - one network just broadcasting sensor data, other network allows changing parameters and 3rd one allows allows software upgrades and so on.
You can be very defensive and design any remote sensing controller to act as two systems - one management cpu only does data routing (no other connection than administrative tasks), sensor cpu works only with sensors. As bonus you can have management cpu act as active firewall.
Main problem it is necessary to have in house expertise (hw, fw and process knowing) which in making company lean are optimized first and outsourcing custom solutions suddenly too expensive.