I agree that for larger systems you would have this redundancy, but I believe the opposite is true for most operations. The very lack of redundancy is the reason facilities continue to use legacy equipment and refuse to patch it out. I don't know how many patches I've had to back out of our test environments because they simply broke one of our fragile SCADA units. Lastly, the life of these systems is much longer than a normal business PC. When we do our build-outs we assume a ten year minimum life for the software and hardware, thus security protocols simply become obsolete at the workstation. For these reasons, we always separate the business and process networks. The only place they can possibly cross over is through the use of pHistorian that communicates with our SQL Server for data retention and analysis.
-Kurt
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I agree that for larger systems you would have this redundancy, but I believe the opposite is true for most operations. The very lack of redundancy is the reason facilities continue to use legacy equipment and refuse to patch it out. I don't know how many patches I've had to back out of our test environments because they simply broke one of our fragile SCADA units. Lastly, the life of these systems is much longer than a normal business PC. When we do our build-outs we assume a ten year minimum life for the software and hardware, thus security protocols simply become obsolete at the workstation. For these reasons, we always separate the business and process networks. The only place they can possibly cross over is through the use of pHistorian that communicates with our SQL Server for data retention and analysis. -Kurt