Remote Diagnostics:

Random outages are an inevitable occurrence in the power generation industry. From the moment the outage hits, every hour equals thousands of dollars in losses and stressful work conditions until one can figure out what went wrong and devise a viable solution to regain control and resolve the problem.

Global Controls offers a premier Remote Assistance and Diagnostics service to help plant managers reduce the risks of downtime and uncertainty during that critical situation in which an engineer may be hours away from your plant or your plant staff does not have the knowledge to manage the crisis.

The company's solution is so effective that Global Controls can effectively provide mechanical instruction, technical support, and other expert advice to help troubleshoot your equipment and get back online—in some cases, without the costly expense of flying engineers to your location.

As a leader in turbine control systems monitoring, Global Controls has developed specialty applications for remote assistance and diagnostics of a customer’s SCADA network by Global Controls engineers. The Remote Assistance and Diagnostics (RAD) solution provides the highest level of technological knowledge and unmatched customer care without damaging the integrity of the security perimeter as defined by NERC.

Remote Assistance Process:

At the core of the design is a remote-access VPN that utilizes an IPSec tunnel that is end-user initiated. This would continue in the tradition of requiring human interaction at the plant by requiring that the onsite controls technician would initiate the VPN tunnel through a screen command, and then would supervise the remote engineer performing the required service. The VPN tunnel would only selectively allow the traffic containing the protocols of the remote viewer. By passing only the desired traffic between the two systems, each system becomes insulated against an infection that neither party may be aware of.

Global Controls works with the network team on-site, allowing them to determine the best way to connect the controls network to internet services. The company asks clients to consider that if a proper security plan or firewall is not in place, there could be a compromise of the controls network, should it be accessed by malicious users.

Global Controls Services

Controls Global Controls currently offers the following product lines for control systems:

Protocol Description

The following is a description of the VPN tunnel, sans the internal proprietary protocols. A basic IPSec tunnel is made up as follows:

Global Controls requires that the firewall between the controls network and the internet (or by way of the intranet) has rules that allow only the above mentioned ports and only toward and away from the VPN Server IP address provided to the site by the team. Please note that any deviation from these guidelines will not be supported by Global Controls.

The following graphic depicts the sample design.

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