This is the fourth part of the Fusion Fundamentals series with Suchi Badrinarayanan, Business Consultant, at Fusion. This series focuses on liberating and normalizing OT data to accelerate enterprise-wide adoption and high business value realization of AI/ML. The fourth topic is Industrial Strength Data Liberation - Advantages. 

Read the video transcript below for your own convenience:

Industrial Strength

When we're talking about industrial strength software and getting operational technology data into a format where analytics can access it in a robust manner, you will need industrial strength software, which is what Fusion is designed for. The larger the data volumes become, the more you'll need an industrial-strength software, and that's exactly what Fusion represents.

Fusion

1. Fusion is incredibly highly performant and low latency. 

   Regardless of whether you have a thousand or a million tags, the latency will remain the same and we have very high performance. 

2. We are able to do automatic Gap detection and backfill, especially when we have first-party connectors to those source systems. 

   You can ensure that your data reliability is very consistent. You will not have people going back into the source systems and going through all levels of the firewall to get their data. It is located in an accessible place for them.

3. Fusion can do any kind of bulk history upload, and you can tailor it according to your use case.

   That way, you do not pay for extra storage in Azure. 

Metadata Transport

Also, there are some other things we can do around the metadata transport and the hierarchy. It just depends on if those are available from the source system. We're able to move and adjust the metadata transport and the hierarchy into the cloud. However, if the metadata transport and the hierarchy are not available, then we can always use a different source where that hierarchical information would be located. 

Data Quality Management

Furthermore, Fusion does a lot with data quality and data preprocessing to ensure that the data landing in the cloud is analytics-ready. We ensure that the data has no gaps as far as the source system is concerned and that any error messages are filled are filtered out.

Protect Production systems.

Historians are notoriously very precarious. In case there's ever a load increase on the historian, or if there are multiple users who are pulling out trends, etc., we make sure that we make sure we monitor the CPU usage, and if it goes above a certain amount, we throttle back our historical upload. That way, the customer is ensuring that the production system is still gathering that data because it is still very important to continue for that to continue to happen.

Uncompressed Data & Data Lakes

If available to us, we will collect uncompress data as well. For any data science purposes, that's something that could be very important.  All of this data can go to any sort of data lake with multiple different deployment options. 

Data Visualization & Alignment for Use

We have created a tender for easy visualization of the data. We've realized that this is a gap in the market right now where there are not a lot of options to visualize data that are within the cloud. So we have a simple trender that you can use to save trends, view trends, and even share trends with other people. 

With Fusion, we are able to align all of the data for analytics purposes. No matter where that data is coming from, whether it's coming from five different historians and IoT sensors, the way that you access that data will always the same. None of this is actually a black box. It's all open and available for your end-users to use in any way they prefer. Fusion does not try to constrain you in any way – your data is yours. We want you to use it as much as possible.

Uptake Fusion - Advantages 

One critical advantage of Uptake Fusion is security. Uptake Fusion is Purdue-Model compliant, and we are heavily investing in nested Edge compatibility with Microsoft. If you have data within your level two or three of your Purdue Model, we have many customers who use Fusion to extract that data. We can do it in a very secure manner and tailor Fusion for everyone's different security needs.

Fusion is not one size fits all. Fusion is very flexible and adapts to the customer's specific needs. 

Another important thing to note is that Fusion is pretty cost-effective. So you can pay for the drink on the ingestion side or pay for the drink on the consumption side. Whichever works best for the customer – we are amenable to ensuring Fusion is incredibly cost-effective for you.

Lastly, the most important thing is that Fusion helps accelerate any of your analytics use cases. So we are compliant with your enterprise cloud and in architecture because we follow a Microsoft-recommended architecture. But, once that data is there, you can use it for any use case or any third-party tool. We don't restrict you in any way from getting that information moving. The deployment's very fast. It typically takes us less than two weeks, and some customers even installed it on their own because of permissions required to get us access to their cloud.