Stephen 'Steve' Pavlosky | Source | Product Management Leader for Manufacturing & Digital Plant at GE Digital

Proficy Historian for Cloud could definitely be a first foray into the cloud for small- or mid-sized manufacturers. It offers these companies a cost-effective and lower maintenance approach to managing their OT data. For data collection, the collectors are on-premises and can buffer the data so that even if cloud connection is unavailable, data is still stored locally and transmitted to the cloud when connection becomes available. The access to historical data from on-premises, however, could be impacted if the cloud connection is lost. We mitigate this risk through three approaches: 1. The cloud historian application itself is designed for high availability and fault tolerance to minimize any application downtime. It utilizes highly resilient managed AWS services that offer 99.9% uptime such as Amazon EKS and Amazon EFS; 2. Customers can choose to set up redundant network connections to AWS to minimize the risk of network failure; and 3. For mission-critical workloads, customers can deploy an additional historian instance on-premises so they can always have access to data locally in case the cloud connection is unavailable.