A Seamless Cloud Migration Approach to Secure Distributed Legacy Industrial SCADA Systems

Currently deployed legacy industrial systems were not designed with the future industry 4.0 vision in mind and lack advanced, and often even basic, security features. Further, the presence of legacy systems not only introduces security and data privacy challenges but is also a barrier for the adoption of emerging cloud technologies. This paper proposes an approach for seamless and secure migration of legacy industrial control systems to the cloud. It investigates whether the cloud can meet the real-time requirements for control operations without compromising system safety. The proposed approach is designed to cause no or minimal interruption to industrial processes during cloud migration and offers a generic framework to be applied for different industrial sectors. As a use case, this paper presents the design and validation for synchrophasor technology in smart grid using the Amazon AWS cloud. Experiments on a real laboratory-based cyber-physical tested concluded that proposed cloud migration approach is promising for time-critical systems such as synchrophasor technology.