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We're a group of students that is gonna set up communication between a S7-1200 PLC and a cloud (probably gonna be MS Azure), to upload measured data (e.g. temperature, pressure).

In what ways is it possible to achieve this, and what communication protocols is recommended for this?

We dont wanna use a second device like Rasperry Pi or Simatic IoT2000...

ZF007
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Petter Foyn
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1 Answers1

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If you have the hand on your cloud server, it's great because then you could build an OpenTCP communication between your PLC and your server and exchange data buffers.

But, in a security point of view, I don't know if Microsoft Azure can authorize that. Because you won't be able to manage authentication or encryption on the PLC.

The protocol would be based on simple TCP socket (standard) then you must create the buffer on the PLC and decode it in your Azure instance, with your own protocol and data definitions.

Hope it helps ;-)

dun32
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  • Thanks for your reply :) I've been told that the s7-1200 might not be secure. Is it so that it's not possible to send data to a cloud from the s7-1200 in a secure way without using some sort of physical gateway? – Petter Foyn Jan 24 '19 at 15:07
  • I've heard this morning about Siemens IoT2040, it could be well adapted in this case. A sort of industrial Raspberry PI : use Modbus server or OPC server on S7-1200 then the gateway grabs the datas, format them and send them to your azure instance with all the needed security requirements. But it depends of the security level you need and how you manage it on azure. – dun32 Jan 24 '19 at 16:09
  • I've heard good things about the IoT2040 aswell, but I wanted to know if there was any good ways to establish connection without using a physical gateway. – Petter Foyn Jan 25 '19 at 14:17
  • You can with OpenTCP but it won't use any authentication mechanism or encryption if you don't develop it :-( and your cloud machine will have to support raw TCP socket communication and you'll have to format the datas to get them usable by human. – dun32 Jan 25 '19 at 15:03