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Node-to-Node Communication

In secure industrial environments, you usually face the situation that you can not access all systems from one centralized system. In reality you have to deal with different networking levels, DMZ, firewall and proxy setups. To break up data silos in an efficient way and enrich data with information from other systems, you often have to deploy logic into different places in your environment.

Once your Nodes are deployed where you want them to be, you can start to implement Node-to-Node communication which allows you to bridge and abstract information from different systems and protocols.

Let’s talk about one simple challenge:

“I want to send information from my OT equipment to my cloud storage but I can not get access to my cloud storage directly from my OT network”.

This sounds pretty basic but can bring up various security related questions. The good thing is that there is a simple answer to that.

You can easily split up this end-to-end process into two flows and deploy them into different Nodes.
In the OT-Node, set up a flow that reads data from your equipment, apply data manipulation and pre-processing if you want, and publish the data to your IT-Node MQTT broker.

The Flow in your IT-Node starts with an MQTT Sub Broker module and picks up the information that has been published. From here, send it outbound to your Cloud system. 

-- same concept can be applied with HTTP instead

To learn more, check out the following knowledge base article:

https://www.crosser.io/knowledgebase/node-to-node-communication-article/

About the author

David Nienhaus | Senior Solution Engineer

David is a Senior Solution Engineer at Crosser. He has over 10 years experience working with software integration and digitization projects for critical infrastructure.
His engineering background gives him the understanding and focus needed to solve customer use cases in the most efficient and successful way.