Ensure manufacturing uptime

Scheduling downtime to run backup operations in manufacturing production environments like factory floors is expensive and disruptive. A better alternative is to find a backup solution that can be installed and then can run backups at any time without need to reboot the OT system or take it offline in a scheduled downtime window. Acronis Cyber Protect enables backup and restoral of OT systems while the system is operational, without the need for schedule downtime. The Acronis backup agent can likewise be initially installed while the OT system is running and without requiring a reboot.

Not every backup vendor for OT systems support real-time backup; many require scheduled downtime to run, a costly and disruptive process in manufacturing production environments like factory floors. Acronis Cyber Protect supports real time backup of OT system without scheduled downtime, and offloads backup processing overhead and storage from the OT system.

While many backup vendors support recent versions of popular operating systems while they are still supported by the OS vendor, most backup vendors end support within one to five years of the OS vendor’s end-of-support date for a particular release and/or version. Acronis Cyber Protect is the only backup vendors that continues to support OS versions dating back to the XP era as well as a broad range of contemporary OSs used in OT, back-office and front-office manufacturing environments. This is particularly important for OT systems, many of which continue to need backup and restoral for many years after the OS vendor’s end-of-support data. Acronis Cyber Protect can back up and restore these systems and thus avoid risky OS upgrades to OT systems in which stability is critical. Backup support for these legacy OSs means that OT engineers can avoid the risk that an upgrade to a newer version of the OS might a) break or limit OT application functionality, or b) de-certify the system from compliance with regulatory standards.

Fast OT system recovery is critical in manufacturing production environments, where downtime can cost thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of dollars per hour. This can be challenging in manufacturing environments without local IT staff, in air-gapped environments that limit centralized IT’s ability to help with remote management tools, and remote manufacturing locations where dispatching IT staff to the site can be costly in both travel expense and extended production downtime. A better alternative is a restoral capability that can be initiated by local staff, even if they don’t have significant IT skills. Acronis Cyber Protect has a One-Click Recovery capability that lets any employee, regardless of their IT skill level, to restore an OT system from a local backup with just a few keystrokes, enabling the restoral of OT systems and the resumption of production operations with a matter of minutes instead of hours or days.

OT systems such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) servers, human-machine interfaces (HMI), operational historians, distributed control systems (DCS) and the like can bring production operations to a halt if they fail, resulting in very costly downtime. The ability to quickly restore these OT systems after a failure for whatever reason – cyber attack, PC hardware failure, software glitch or human error – is essential to keep production systems up and running. Having a local backup and restoral solution like Acronis Cyber Protect can get failed OT systems back online in a matter of minutes, to new PC hardware if necessary via its Bare-Metal Recovery feature. The One-Click Recovery feature of Acronis Cyber Protect also ensures that OT systems can be quickly restored by any local employee with a few simple keystrokes in a matter of minutes, eliminating the delays, travel expense, and extended production outage costs associated with dispatching central IT to the site.

A well-designed backup solution optimized for OT environments is essential to minimize the downtime of critical OT systems like SCADA, HMIs and operational historians, the failure of which can cause costly manufacturing production shutdowns. Acronis Cyber Protect is widely used in manufacturing OT environments for exactly this purpose, and is frequently white-labled or co-branded by leading automation vendors. Acronis Cyber Protect leverage over 20 years of development as a backup vendor to offer features that make protecting OT systems highly reliable, fast and automatic, including flexible scheduling options, event-triggered backups, incremental and differential backups, flexibility of choice of backup destinations, automatic cloud replication, and more. Customizable backup routines can automatically run backup operations at specific times or in response to event triggers, and to automatically store backups in locations ranging from locally attached drives, network attached storage, storage area networks, private clouds, cloud service providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and the Acronis Cloud.