Man-made and natural disasters threaten critical industrial infrastructure including automation systems for power and processing plants. These threats range from cyber attacks and computer virus infections to damage caused by hurricanes and floods. While most plants have rigorous security measures to intercept and defend against them, few do a good job of preparing for recovery if the threat is actually successful.

Modern plant automation is comprised of multiple, disparate systems, such as DCSs, PLCs, SISs, and historians, all of which have been independently designed to accomplish a specific mission, but are integrated together to enable seamless operations. These systems are in a constant state of change as they are platforms for continuous process improvement.

Disaster recovery is often complicated by the fact that these individual systems are the responsibility of different organizations within the plant. Backup schedules and procedures vary among the organizations, making it difficult to ensure synchronized restoration images for all of the individual systems in the event of a disaster. Since they are highly integrated, restoring systems individually from non-synchronized images may result in configuration mismatches that impair the ability to restart.

Since automation systems are essential to plant operations, failed or delayed plant restarts due to impaired automation configuration recovery are very costly. Based upon typical operating margins, a 250,000 barrel-per-day oil refinery may lose as much as $67,000 per hour during an impaired restart. Similar lost production costs apply to other industries as well.

As a full restoration of automation systems is performed very rarely, plant personnel are unlikely to be adequately prepared to implement it, further delaying restart. The best way to mitigate these problems is a comprehensive solution that addresses the disparities among the systems, the synchronization of their backups, and provides a guided restoration procedure from a common platform.

The Integrity Disaster Recovery solution fulfills this need through a combination of expert services and the inherent capabilities of Integrity™ Software, which maps the Automation Genome™ of over 40 different automation systems. Integrity Disaster Recovery provides a synchronized backup image of all plant automation systems, including legacy systems that are not supported by standard IT tools. This backup image is linked to a common, guided procedure that can be implemented from a single user interface. The solution includes:

A comprehensive survey of automation assets resulting in a baseline report
Design of a site-specific disaster recovery plan to establish:
- Step-by-step recovery procedure
- Roles and responsibilities
- Change management process
- Testing, validation and training
Implementation of automatic archiving
Periodic health check of the archive
Onsite and offsite storage of the archive

The benefits of the Integrity Disaster Recovery solution for automation systems include:

Fastest possible recovery from natural or man-made disaster
Restoration of all configuration to the same state as before the incident
Central repository for all archives with option for secure alternative location
A common platform and procedure for full restoration
Ability to archive and restore configuration of systems not supported by conventional IT tools

PAS’ extensive experience with automation qualifies us uniquely to assess all of your plant’s systems and create a site-specific recovery plan that ensures the fastest restart possible after an automation-related disaster. And, our Integrity Software provides automatic data archiving, health checking, reporting, and restoration mechanisms necessary to fulfill the plan and ensure manufacturing continuity. Click here to download the "Integrity Disaster Recovery" cutsheet.

For further information, please call us at +1.281.286.6565 or contact us via the website.