Difference between SCADA and IoT

IoT is complimentary to SCADA and DCS. Information generated from SCADA systems acts as one of the data sources for IoT. SCADA’s focus is on monitoring and control. IoT’s focus is firmly on analyzing machine data to improve your productivity and impact your top line.

IoT begins where SCADA, DCS end.

  • Metadata driven architecture. You can connect anything: machines, vehicles, bar code readers, solar panels, weather stations and have the ability to process data across all these sources together.

  • The ability to do real time complex stream processing of data from multiple sources .

  • The ability to analyze large amounts of machine data. The ability to apply modern supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to predict outcomes.( machine learning)

  • Built with the cloud in mind and provides flexible, affordable pay-as-you go plans. Systems that provide the ability go go private when the situation demands.SCADA does not.

IoT is the advance of SCADA (or [web SCADA], where you get to bring your system to the cloud and have them communicate with each other. IoT stands for Internet of Things, when it is used for industrial purpose, it shall be called as IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things). Normally people compared SCADA with IIoT, instead of IoT.

As previous answers given, IIoT has all SCADA’s function. In other words, IIoT is SCADA with extra features, i.e. communication between the whole system via network, where all the system devices can collect/exchange data with each other. Of course, these data can then be analyzed and processed like what SCADA does.

Hence, IIoT is the advance of SCADA, which communication and connectivity between all “Things” are the focus.

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