Just Add SCADA

Internet-hosted SCADA systems are a modern answer to modern municipal water and wastewater concerns.

By Thelma Akwei and Ben Manlongat

Water and wastewater utilities are under increasing pressure to prevent service disruption, control costs, and provide management and regulators with detailed process information. This requires a modern supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, including remote monitoring and control hardware such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and remote terminal units (RTUs), a communication network (usually radio-based), and a human machine interface (HMI) software application running on one or more networked computers. Many utilities simply cannot afford either the upfront cost of this infrastructure or the long-term maintenance it requires. This article describes how a hosted Internet solution can help such utilities quickly achieve advanced SCADA systems that would have been impossible considering the costs of traditional SCADA architecture.