I'm at the Invensys Process Systems users conference this week in San Antonio. Companies involved in the conference are Foxboro, Triconex and Avantis. Amazingly, two days ago I was refereeing a college soccer match in Ohio in 41 degree (F) temperatures with wind gusts up to 30 mph. I get out of the taxi last night at 11 pm to be greeted with 82 degree humid weather. Travel is always a shock.
The key word of the conference is security. The opening keynote presentations included David Sanders of the US Department of Homeland Security, Eric Byres of the British Columbia Institute of Technology and Peter Meisner lead project manager of Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
There was a ton of useful advice--perhaps one of the most useful keynotes I've ever attended. Meisner unveiled a lot of behind the scenes work at Microsoft as it tries to change cultures from marketing driven features provider to engineering driven security conscious provider. He also announced a working alliance between Microsoft and Cisco designed to enhance security over a network.
The most useful advice was that everyone should carefully analyze all the ways that outsiders can attack your system. Don't just stop with e-mail or terrorists. Viruses brought in through ports that you thought were closed could be a weakness. Companies should also do careful risk analysis, see where the most serious risks are and fix things in the order of seriousness. Looking at hands raised during questioning from the multitude of users in the audience, there is a lot of work to be done to secure our control systems from outside attack, whether from terrorists or hackers.
Right now I'm sitting in a session on alarm management. It's amazing how many problems there are that still remain after all these years of developing various types of alarms and ways to present them to operators. This presentation brought up more questions and discussion than any of the other presentations that I attended. One thing people wanted to see was a way to check the alarms and display the highest level alarm. Kudos to Rob Brooks of PPG Industries.
5:16:42 PM 
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