Moving SCADA Systems to IaaS Clouds

SCADA systems allow users to monitor and/or control physical devices, processes and events remotely. As these systems are critical to industrial processes, they are often run on highly reliable and dedicated hardware. Moving these SCADA systems to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, allows for: cheaper deployments, system redundancy support, and increased uptime, however it is not clear to what degree clouds can support the real-time requirements. Experiments were carried out to examine the effects of using cloud resources and public networks have on SCADA systems. Using the "Life-and-Shift" approach, eclipseSCADA was deployed to the NeCTAR research cloud. Performance metrics were collected from the deployed eclipseSCADA system under different loads. From these collected metrics, a series of recommendations are provided for deploying and modifying a SCADA system on IaaS cloud resources.