Providing the Best Experience, Support, and Value for Process Manufacturers
If 2020 has proven anything, it is that agility and resilience are imperatives for process manufacturers. Demands on technology infrastructure, a critical enabler for business continuity, along with demands for data-driven operational decisions, are increasing rapidly. Add to this the expanding number of team members working from home, and you have a situation where the ability of IT organizations to support operational needs is being pushed to the limits of both capacity and capability.
It is no longer acceptable for manufacturers to spend months or years executing digital transformation, and McKinsey & Company, a leading strategy consulting firm, suggests tech modernization and acceleration of cloud adoption will be critical for the post-COVID recovery. Digital transformation in 2020 is critical to fiscal survival.
With this context in mind, Seeq is encouraging our customers to adopt Seeq SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) as the fastest and best choice for accelerating the business outcomes that can achieved by empowering their employees with Seeq’s advanced analytics applications.
Seeq SaaS enables users to monitor, diagnose, and prevent asset and production performance issues, while working from anywhere and still staying connected to all the process and contextual data they need. This is the case whether the data is stored on-premises at the plant, in a centralized datacenter, or in a cloud database—and this access can be accomplished while minimizing additional asks of their IT teams.
What is Seeq SaaS? Seeq SaaS is Seeq managed as a service by the Seeq team. With Seeq SaaS, Seeq is responsible to install, deploy, monitor, optimize, and update Seeq for your organization.
Seeq Deployment Options
Seeq offers three deployment options: Seeq as SaaS, in your private cloud, or on-premise. While Seeq performs well in all three cases, only Seeq SaaS reduces the workload on your IT organization by becoming an extension of your team and handling the IT management tasks that are often difficult to navigate in a changing landscape. (More information available on Seeq Deployment Overview):
Seeq SaaS brings best practices for server management, scalability, security, and data protection—as well as updates, backups, support, and cost savings. These services address advanced needs that organizations may find challenging or impossible to provide organically.
Seeq SaaS brings a portfolio of capabilities, now and in the future, focused on providing the Best Experience, Best Support, and Best Value.
Best Experience
- Availability - Easily access Seeq from anywhere via and device capable of hosting a browser, with single sign-on support.
- Security - Securely access data, regardless of whether that data resides on-premises, in the cloud, or across numerous sources worldwide.
- Functionality - Access to all new capabilities and features as they are regularly released.
- Right-Sizing - System resources are monitored and expanded as you grow before a bottleneck interrupts operation. Imagine never having to navigate a lengthy capital purchase approval cycle again.
Best Support
- Reliability - 24x7 monitoring of availability and connectivity, with dedicated Seeq subject matter experts available to address any issues.
- Business Continuity - Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity capabilities are standard. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 24 hours, and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of single-digit hours. Backups are performed and monitored daily, validated regularly, vaulted, and encrypted in multiple geographic locations.
- Best Practices for Network Security – Firewalls and filters, built on top of the substantial resources that AWS and Microsoft Azure employ in this area. Defenses to emerging threats are incorporated as they become available.
- Failover, Scaling, Redundancy – Seeq continues to evolve and innovate Seeq SaaS by developing best practices and capabilities, which may be challenging to deploy in a cost-effective manner on-premise with SaaS.
- Seeq Support Team works hand in hand with Seeq developers – The Seeq SaaS support team collaborates daily with our development team. As a result, our deployment strategies will evolve just as rapidly as our software, critical to ensuring our customers’ long-term success.
Best Value
- Cost Savings and Cost Certainty – Seeq SaaS has the same user-based subscription licensing as Seeq deployed in a private cloud or on-premises. However, Seeq SaaS customers don’t pay the underlying cloud infrastructure or server hardware costs inherent to other deployment models, leading to immediate cost savings and certainty.
- Internal IT Management – No requirement for internal IT personnel to worry about the day-to-day operations and management of Seeq. IT can focus on driving continued business value for users, while Seeq manages the SaaS.
Accelerate Time to Value
Organizations choosing Seeq SaaS can have access to Seeq in a matter of hours. This includes the flexibility to securely connect to OT data stored on-premise in enterprise historians, such as OSIsoft PI or AspenTech IP21, as well as to data stored in business, manufacturing systems, or cloud data warehouses. Seeq doesn’t move or copy the source data, but instead simply makes this data accessible for Seeq users anywhere, avoiding the expense and complexity of managing moved or copied data.
With digital transformation initiatives, many organizations begin with a plan to move data to the cloud to ensure ubiquitous data access as the first step, but this can be a long, expensive, and complex process.
With Seeq, you can start achieving value from analytics and insights without the need to move data to the cloud, although Seeq can easily access any cloud-based data. In addition, with Seeq SaaS, Seeq can be deployed in any AWS Availability Zone or Azure Region, ensuring your engineers, operators, managers, or data scientists at any location around the world have easy global access to Seeq.
Security and Data Protection
Seeq ensures the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of customer data in Seeq SaaS:
- All Seeq SaaS connections employ encrypted and authenticated links (HTTPS) to ensure data security in flight.
- All Seeq SaaS data storage is encrypted to ensure data security at rest.
- Seeq’s architecture enables connection with on-premise data sources without the need to open in-bound network ports on your corporate firewall, preserving your existing security posture.
- Seeq’s SaaS Operations subscribe to numerous industry compliance standards for high degrees of security, reliability, and operational effectiveness. Seeq internal controls include ongoing risk and vulnerability analysis, intrusion attempt detection, and closed-loop continuous improvement response procedures.
“My IT team will want to know how you manage network security.” Seeq doesn’t drill through your corporate defenses or ask you to open vulnerable ports to “reach into” your network. We instead make use of a small-footprint Remote Agent to connect to your on-premise data sources, and this agent authenticates with your data source locally and establishes an encrypted, secure outbound connect to Seeq SaaS via standard HTTPS protocols. Once established, requests for data are received over this link, fulfilled locally by the agent, and then encrypted and compressed for secure, efficient delivery to the Seeq SaaS environment.
“How do you secure access into Seeq?” While Seeq can make use of a local directory of user accounts, our best practice for SaaS is for Seeq to integrate with your corporate Single Sign-On provider. Seeq supports identity solutions ranging from Azure Active Directory to standards-based providers such as Ping Federated, OKTA, and others. If your provider supports Multi-Factor Authentication controls, then Seeq will inherently employ those as well. We also can limit Seeq access to only certain groups in your corporate directory, and if your data source provides for item-level security on your data sources, Seeq has support for that level of granularity as well.
“My company doesn’t want to store data in the cloud, at least not yet.” Seeq is not a lift-and-shift solution. Instead, Seeq connects to existing data sources as they stand and respect them as the source of record for all data. When a user needs data as part of an analysis, Seeq will request only the specific data necessary to fulfill the request and bring that data into the server in a secured and encrypted manner to perform the analysis. The source data remains in its original source location.
Get Started Quickly with Seeq SaaS with AWS Marketplace or Azure Marketplace
One of the fastest and simplest paths to get started with Seeq SaaS is by using AWS Marketplace or Azure Marketplace to purchase Seeq SaaS subscriptions. With AWS or Azure Marketplace, Seeq can be purchased as part of your AWS or Azure cloud bill, simplifying the purchase and management of Seeq subscriptions and reducing the steps needed to start gaining value. Seeq SaaS has been verified as “ready-to-run” by both AWS and Azure as part of their requirements for Marketplace partners.
Today, more and more customers are choosing Seeq SaaS to accelerate time to value and digital transformation. Seeq is committed to customer success for all the deployment options we support and Seeq SaaS is, unequivocally, our recommendation for best experience, best support, and best value.
More Information
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