Oil, Gas & Mining

Managing increasingly autonomous, connected assets in real-time

$290-390 billion. That’s the McKinsey report estimate of annual productivity savings that oil, gas, and mining industries globally can expect by 2035. It’s just one more instance of an industry experiencing rapid, massive change.

Today, your assets are likely all network connections generating data. Drilling and hauling increasingly rely on autonomous systems. Control systems are amped with automation. Everything is operating in real-time — mines, oil rigs, seaports; truck, rail, and airborne networks; R&D, operations, factories, and corporate departments. When an element fails or underperforms, entire value chains are put at risk. Security can be comprised, costs can increase and waiting for tech support to arrive at remote sites wastes time and money.

The answer is real-time, remote device management.

Scaling Remotely

Monitoring thousands of pieces of equipment that are connected to one data center or multiple dispersed locations can be a big challenge. Dispatching technicians to remote locations like pipelines, well and communication sites can make updates become costly.  Every firmware update, software patch and configuration change unnecessarily increases the workload.

Deployed via gateways and infrastructure managers from Opengear, Out-of-Band (OOB) management is simple and inexpensive. Using OOB, your network and systems admins can access, monitor, configure, and troubleshoot your company’s connected assets wherever they are — remotely. More important, it helps to increase uptime. How? Embedded management intelligence at the network edge that proactively analyzes network performance. Potential faults are immediately reported. Common issues are automatically detected and repaired. Proactive alerts appear on a user-friendly dashboard showing the status of your assets and network infrastructure in real-time. You can see issues and fix them before they result in equipment or application failures.

Failover to Cellular

Utilizing the extensive cellular networks established around the world, Opengear OOB management products also include a Failover-to-Cellular™ (F2C) feature.  If an unforeseen outage takes down your WAN in one or more remote sites, within seconds your infrastructure switches to a cellular connection to remain online and operational. Always-on OOB remote management features are preserved. F2C is a big advance in availability, reliability, and speeds from the satellite and local radio networks used in the past by oil, gas, and mining field operations.

• Remote provisioning, backup, configuration and troubleshooting to reduce costs for maintenance, IT staffing and travel.
• Reduced MTBF and MTTR with proactive problem identification, quick notification and prompt response to system or network connectivity issues
• Support global operations through secure, robust OOB management and secure failover to 4G LTE in the event of a WAN failure.
• Management access to equipment via cellular, POTS or another network to deploy new equipment or to perform remediation if the primary network is down or hacked.
• Simplified remote management through automation and orchestration.
• A vendor-agnostic solution that integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure.