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Blog

Orbit 60: a data secure condition monitoring system

3 min read
Darren
Darren Evans
Global Hardware Commercial Leader


Technological advancements have led to the constant generation of massive data sets in the oil and gas industry. Yet, the utilization of such data continues to present a number of challenges, specifically from a security and operational perspective. While data is widely accepted as a precious commodity – and certainly more valuable than oil, it is not without risk. Across the oil & gas industry, companies are forced to take increasingly extreme measures to protect and secure their data.

It’s estimated that global data breaches are costing businesses approximately $400 billion a year, while others predict costs to reach in excess of $90 trillion by 2030 (SAP, 2019).

For Bently Nevada, data optimization and data security go hand-in-hand. You simply cannot have one without the other. As specialists in secure data collection, our teams operate within a number of applications – such as monitoring rotating machinery. Within this application, Bently Nevada’s data collection process provides protection and condition monitoring insights for anticipating and preventing mechanical failure and unplanned downtime. Such information can be used to provide event association and performance monitoring enabling proper root cause analysis and would help customers solve many issues quickly. 

Therefore, as Bently Nevada, how do we contribute to the collection of machinery data while ensuring its security? This has been achieved with Bently Nevada's Orbit 60 Series†, a new machine protection and condition monitoring system, which has launched to the market and focuses on securing data directly from the sensor to the condition monitoring software.

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Smarter Uptime Minimizes Unplanned Downtime

With the launch of the new Orbit 60, Bently Nevada is consolidating decades of experience with top-of-the-line data security and accessibility. With that said, a module has been designed and engineered containing data isolation circuitry to isolate the condition monitoring and protection networks, allowing data to be sent directly to business networks without risk of exposing protection and control networks to ingression. This module is known as, the Condition Monitoring Module (CMM), which primarily functions to transfer data to condition monitoring software for visualization. This module can listen to all the data from the Orbit 60 data bus, including process data, alarms and events, calculated values or dynamic sensor data. The CMM prevents any attempted changes to be made on the backplane of the protection monitoring system.

The Orbit 60 is being certified to IEC 62443-4-2 Security Level (SL) 2 and is architected to achieve up to Security Level (SL) 4, providing confidence that the retrieved data can be accessed through the CM module to the business network worry-free. The CMM’s circuit according to Steve Sturm, the Product Manager, is a “listen-only mode” to the process network, which means it can only receive data and is incapable of affecting the functionality of the protection system. Accessing data through the CM module minimizes the risk of a cyberattack to the rest of the system while allowing the insightful and actionable data to the experts that need it the most.

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CMM Module

The Orbit 60 Series is the first intrinsically isolated machinery monitoring system. With built-in data isolation in the condition monitoring module from the protection system and plant network, the Orbit 60 connects seamlessly to your condition monitoring software for proactive monitoring and diagnostics.

Condition monitoring module (CMM):   

  • Direct connection to business network—simplify network architecture (remove complex firewalls and database replication)
  • Bi-direction communication from System 1 for on the fly changes/requests
  • All real-time data available for consumption in System 1

No bi-directional electronics:   

  • In case of cyber attack, it is impossible for CMM to affect the operation of the protection system
  • All data broadcasted to CMM automatically, no need for CMM to request information from the system

As Jerry Pritchard, Bently Nevada Global Sales Leader, stated in his Lightning Talk at the Baker Hughes Annual Meeting, “Orbit 60 is the next generation platform” and “ensures that machinery protection is never compromised”. 

To learn more about our game-changing solution, please fill out our contact us form and indicate you are interested in our our Data Security whitepaper today