Efficient management of numerous devices

SPRECON-NDM makes it easy

The number of digital devices is constantly on the rise and their maintenance also presents your staff with an increasingly complex challenge. Especially in station automation, more and more digitally networked devices are being used, which must be inventoried and monitored in detail primarily from an IT security perspective.

At Sprecher Automation, we have naturally thought about this and have developed a tool that allows you to manage your digital assets easily and efficiently. Together with some of our customers, we looked at what the most important requirements are to be able to manage potentially many thousands of devices:

  • Efficient commissioning: Standardised basic functionality in each unit, which is individualised per unit/station with minimal effort
  • Roll-out of configurations: It must be possible to distribute extensive configuration changes to many devices at the push of a button.
  • Roll-out of software updates: It must be possible to distribute software updates to devices with little effort.
  • Cybersecurity (configuration and patch management): Information security requires that both software versions and security-related configurations are kept up-to-date.
  • Inventory: Optimal asset management requires the ability to centrally record and evaluate installed device types as well as software and configuration statuses in real time.
  • Monitoring: It must be possible to centrally collect and evaluate technical malfunctions or faults from many thousands of devices in real time.
  • Intrusion detection: Even if this is not one of the core requirements of a management platform, the platform functions for monitoring and inventory also provide significant added value for attack detection.

All these functions are necessary to be able to install and operate the multitude of digital devices cost-efficiently. Commissioning and running costs are reduced and, due to the large number of units, a significant lever is created for the financing of large-scale rollouts.

With the automation devices of the SPRECPN platform, Sprecher Automation has been pushing digitisation in power systems for a long time. Therefore, we have already gained extensive experience with such platforms from both IoT and network domains, with SPRECON devices being integrated into such platforms in real operation.

What becomes apparent in practice: Digital power systems almost never consist solely of products and services from a single manufacturer. It is therefore all the more important that many different manufacturers can be integrated into a central platform with manageable effort. Inflexible IoT platforms struggle here with some disadvantages and are therefore difficult to use. Platforms from the area of network management are thus better suited.

On the one hand, SPRECON-NDM makes it possible to easily implement all the above-mentioned requirements and use cases for the mass management of SPRECON devices. In addition, it is open for the integration of any third-party products through standardised network interfaces – whether from the field of network technology, control, protection or telecontrol technology. A foundation stone has thus been laid for the even better operation of large digital ecosystems in the future.