Migration of a SCADA system to IaaS clouds – a case study

Abstract

Abstract SCADA systems allow users to monitor and/or control physical devices, processes, and events remotely and in real-time. As these systems are critical to industrial processes, they are often run on highly reliable and dedicated hardware. Moving these SCADA systems to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud allows for: cheaper deployments, system redundancy support, and increased uptime. The goal of this work was to present the results of our experimental study of moving/migrating a selected SCADA system to a cloud environment and present major lessons learned. To this end, EclipseSCADA was deployed to the NeCTAR research cloud using the “lift and shift” approach. Performance metrics of a unique nature and large scale of experimentation were collected from the deployed EclipseSCADA system under different loads to examine the effects cloud resources and public networks have on SCADA behavior.

Keywords

• SCADA
• IaaS cloud
• Migration
• Case study