Know Whether It’s Time to Replace a Control System
Since the industrial revolution, control systems have evolved to form technological nerve centers; providing supervisory control and data acquisition to accomplish tasks that help improve human conditions or produce automated outcomes for various applications.
Control systems have an expiration date, a shelf–life and a best-by date. This can be difficult to predict and is driven by advances in hardware and software technology, changes in manufacturing processes and in some cases, forced obsolescence by vendors.
As owners face operational issues of aging facility and utility infrastructure, maintenance and updates to their control systems are typically overlooked. As a result, many owners are facing costly upgrades and replacements due to active or impending obsolescence of their control system assets, thus presenting vulnerabilities to their operations in the form of reliability, resiliency and security risks.
Billy Fox, control systems and cybersecurity principal, has featured in a Consulting-Specifying Engineer article, with specific commentary on how to determine the correct time to replace a control system.
