Siemens and Veeam prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution by minimizing manufacturing plant downtime

Today, approximately a third of all manufacturing machines worldwide incorporate Siemens technology. Companies in the process industry, which are focused on turning bulk raw materials into other products, opt for Siemens because of its comprehensive, end-to-end automation portfolio that combines the real and the digital world.

“We are on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our automation solutions are driving that change,” said Benjamin Lauterlein, Service Product Owner at Siemens AG. “Companies that work with Siemens can find a competitive edge in higher productivity, efficiency, speed and quality. A key part of our offering in this area is our Industrial Automation DataCenter — a comprehensive solution for IT/OT convergence, delivered ready to plug and play, providing high availability and cybersecurity.”

Lauterlein continues: “Availability is one of the highest priorities for customers in industries including chemical, pharma and food and beverage. Disruption to manufacturing processes can quickly spiral into losses of a million dollars upwards per day. Therefore, we are always looking for solutions to increase availability and cybersecurity even further.”

Siemens kicked off a search for a robust, high-performance solution that would enable it to add effective data protection to its Industrial Automation DataCenter offering. The company looked for a tool that could adapt to many different customer environments.

“Our customers depend on a wide range of hardware, software and applications, so we wanted data protection technology that worked with everything,” said Lauterlein. “Since this solution would become part of our commercial offering, it was essential that we could trust it with our customers’ data — our reputation depends on it.”

Siemens selected Veeam Data Platform to expand its IT/OT service offering.

“We evaluated multiple vendors,” said Lauterlein. “Ultimately, our assessment showed that Veeam is the most reliable and flexible option on the market today. The lack of vendor lock-in is a huge advantage to us, since it allows us to build a service offering that can work with a whole range of customer environments.”

Siemens has extended its Industrial Automation DataCenter offering with Backup & Restore Professional Services, powered by Veeam. For customers who opt for the service, the company manages backup and restore for all data related to their plant operations.

“Using Veeam, we can offer our customers comprehensive data protection without impact on plant performance,” said Lauterlein. “We developed a standard packaged solution that includes 36 TB of disk storage plus the option of pre-configured tape storage if customers want an extra layer of redundancy.”

The Siemens Digital Enterprise Services team leveraged Veeam APIs to shape a simplified, streamlined experience for plant operators. By giving these operators control of data protection while minimizing administrative effort, the company is helping its customers boost productivity.

“We created a wizard incorporating Veeam APIs to allow users to create backups with a customized configuration at the push of a button,” said Lauterlein. “We’ve built on Veeam’s ease of use to ensure that our customers can just set it and forget it.”

The new Backup & Restore service has been well-received, enabling Siemens to grow its footprint in existing customer installations.

“Since we established an OEM partnership with Veeam, we’ve brought our Backup and Restore service to more than 200 customers around the world,” said Lauterlein. “Our SIMATIC PCS 7 distributed control system is a leading process control system with tens of thousands of installations worldwide. Every one of those customers is a potential user of the Industrial Automation DataCenter Backup & Restore service, so the market opportunity is huge.”

Together, Siemens and Veeam are helping the process industry to modernize plants and realize the benefits of digitalization. The company is taking advantage of the Veeam ecosystem to optimize its offering to customers.

“Every member of the Veeam team we’ve met has been very responsive and knowledgeable,” said Lauterlein. “Veeam encourage us to engage with the wider Veeam user community, which has enabled us to share knowledge and best practices. We can bring all these learnings to our customers in the form of service improvements.”

Looking ahead, Siemens and Veeam will continue to work closely together to offer customers more choice, flexibility and security.

“We’re currently developing different-sized options of our Backup & Restore service with varying feature sets,” said Lauterlein. “The goal is to make it easier for smaller companies to run their plants with our solutions, and to give larger enterprises greater choice. We’re exploring functionality such as Veeam SureBackup to incorporate more advanced defense against ransomware into our solutions, too. We’ve achieved a great deal with Veeam already, and we’re excited to find out what we can do next to speed up Industry 4.0.”

• Enabled Siemens to extend its offering, making it more attractive to its customers. 
  Already, more than 200 customers have adopted our Industrial Automation DataCenter Backup & Restore service, powered by Veeam,” said Lauterlein. “And it’s still early days — by combining the innovation of Siemens and Veeam, we see the potential to grow this part of the business significantly.”
• Minimized downtime for critical plant control operations, allowing customers to avoid million-dollar losses. 
  With help from Veeam, Siemens prevents failed backups affecting plant performance and enables rapid recovery from disaster.
• Increased business resilience in the process industry, boosting the competitiveness of both Siemens and its customers. 
  Increasingly, our customers have asked to put their backup and restore operations in our hands,” said Lauterlein. “Now we can respond with a robust, reliable service offering enabled by Veeam that helps them stand out in the market.”