FAQ: « Does using your SCADA system
involve you having remote access
to our data or our facilities ? »
Our industrial-grade SCADA software solution is released under the GPL licence; it’s source code is therefore available for you to check it, but also to ensure that you can maintain it in the long term (hence the ‘LTS’ in its name).
This does NOT in any way imply that you must run it on our servers or in our data centres, nor that you must grant us remote access to it.
Unlike other platforms, Linux can guarantee you complete independence, autonomy and security with regard to your data, even when we provide you remote support on your request.
We provide the software as Docker images, FlatPack bundle, “exe” installation file (for Windows), bootable USB stick, source-code, … so that you can install it on your own hardware, in your premises, without requiring any Internet access whatsoever.
What if I need your help ?
The bootable USB stick image allows you, for your convenience, to establish a VPN connection to our support centre at your request, provided your computer has internet access.
From that point, you will be able to request remote assistance from us, which you will need to initiate yourself each time. As long as you do not take any deliberate action to grant us remote access to your computer, we don’t have any such access.
The availability of our software source-code allows you to verify the accuracy of these statements.
Other possibilities:
We recommend that the Scada-LTS server in production should NOT be accessible from the Internet AT ALL, for obvious security reasons.
We can offer you a specific firewall solution, featuring robust 3D authentication based on plain standard OTP/TOTP, which will allow your staff to temporarily access the Scada-LTS web interface remotely from outside your internal network.
Another option is to use an OpenVPN server, which will allow your authorized users to access the Scada-LTS web interface remotely, but only through these VPNs.
We also provide these solutions on request.
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| Abil’I.T. OpenVPN server management interface. |
In this case, you may choose to grant us access to such a VPN so that we can assist you remotely, or even regularly check the health of your Scada-LTS server in production, or provide maintenance services under your monitoring, such as updates, configuration adjustments, database clean-ups, etc.
You may also just follow our Remote-Assistance procedure, that can also be done from your Scada-LTS server, so at your initiative.
Please note that this procedure does not make use of any third-party proprietary software neither “cloud-based service”, as we care about your server security !
Open-source software does not mean security threats at all. It’s quite the opposite!
The difference is that every threat is known to the public, because the source code is a playground for the cyber community — something that does not happen with proprietary software.
Furthermore, a very important consideration, if you wish to safeguard your security, your sovereignty and the integrity of your data, is the careful choice of the underlying operating system…
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