Ensuring secure access to the right data

Over the last two decades, growing quantities of data and better operational insights have benefited the process industries with profitable results. However, one large obstacle still frequently looms for pipeline operators, refineries, and petrochemical plants around the world: operational silos, which create barriers among departments, teams, and functions. The challenges presented by these silos become more pronounced when looking across the fence line for opportunities to collaborate with third-party business partners and vendors.

It is common for process manufacturing facilities to partner with outside companies – including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), process chemical suppliers, catalyst vendors, reactor technology providers, and more – to optimise operational efficiency. While sharing information with these stakeholders traditionally had its challenges, new digital solutions are enabling better collaboration than ever before.

Modern technologies are providing access to disparate data sources in secure and centralised software ecosystems for plant personnel and external stakeholders, empowering outside subject matter experts (SMEs) to contribute equipment analysis and process insights. This expertise helps detect issues and provide early warnings of potential failure, a significant shift from the lookback analysis most of these specialists had grown accustomed to performing with access to limited datasets.

With enhanced monitoring and collaboration, all stakeholders benefit from increased trust, better working relationships, and increased workforce efficiency. The combination of these benefits improves overall production and product quality, while reducing equipment downtime.

Establish custom cross-company historical data access securely

Vendors often include performance monitoring services in the commercial arrangement when selling their technologies to refineries and petrochemical companies. Historically, this monitoring was executed retroactively, and in the few cases when live data was examinable, the data set was typically narrow. This created only after-the-fact and/or partial insights, informing recommendations for operating units efficiently to prevent upsets. Additionally, many issues that could have been mitigated with earlier insight were not identified until they created larger problems, such as reduced production quantity, quality, or compromised equipment integrity that could cause process safety or environmental incidents.

The greatest challenge to near-real-time performance analysis is providing safe and secure access to live time series data outside of the plant that can be fed to multiple third-party organisations. The datasets of interest are often too large to share via email or traditional inter-organisational communication means. Historically, this was sometimes alleviated by USB data exchange – which carried its own set of security concerns – or file upload to a shared drive, such as Dropbox or SharePoint. But no matter the method, the data being shared was outdated before an export was sent to the third party, and even more so by the time an SME recipient was able to review it. Without an efficient and secure alternative, hindsight analysis became the norm, leaving SMEs with no ability to provide timely insights on live operations.

If third parties had access to end users’ process historians, these issues could be somewhat alleviated, but several security concerns remain with direct external access to such a critical information store and plant asset. Constrained by the datasets an end-user representative engineer provides them with, vendors can experience a ‘Goldilocks’ effect. While in some cases they may receive a ‘data dump’ – for example, a spreadsheet with little context, but seemingly unlimited rows and columns of information that bury relevant signals, requiring time-consuming filtering – in others, they may receive an incomplete dataset, preventing the ability to…

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Read the article online at: https://www.worldpipelines.com/special-reports/02052024/ensuring-secure-access-to-the-right-data/