What is Software Defined Automation?
What is Industrial DevOps?
Industrial DevOps applies the principles of DevOps — automation, continuous integration, version control, and collaboration — to industrial automation and manufacturing environments. It bridges the gap between IT and OT by giving automation engineers structured workflows for developing and deploying PLC programs, reducing manual errors, enabling faster rollouts, and creating a full audit trail of changes across the factory floor.
What problems does SDA solve for manufacturing companies?
SDA addresses core challenges in industrial automation:
1. Version control chaos — most factories have no structured versioning for PLC code, leading to lost changes, undocumented modifications, and production risk.
2. Slow and risky deployments — updating automation software across multiple machines or sites is manual, error-prone, and often requires unplanned downtime.
3. OT/IT silos — engineering and IT teams work in disconnected toolchains, making collaboration, compliance, and change management difficult.
4. Unreliable backup and recovery — traditional backups capture a snapshot but not the context of what changed or why, leaving teams without a real path back to a known-good state when something breaks.
5. Security and compliance gaps — OT environments often lack the access control, encryption, and audit trails that regulations like NIS2 and IEC 62443 now require. SDA unifies these workflows into a single platform purpose-built for OT — combining version control, automated backup and restore, and role-based security with AI-assisted change documentation to reduce manual overhead.
Which PLC brands and automation systems does SDA support?
SDA supports a wide range of PLC platforms and industrial automation vendors, including Siemens TIA Portal, Rockwell Automation / Allen-Bradley, Beckhoff TwinCAT, Schneider Electric, Mitsubishi, and others. The platform is designed to be vendor-agnostic, allowing mixed-vendor environments — which are the norm in large manufacturing operations — to be managed within a single unified pipeline.
How does SDA differ from other traditional backup tools?
Traditional backup tools store snapshots of PLC programs but offer no active pipeline for development, testing, or deployment. SDA is additive to backup: it delivers the full DevOps workflow on top of your existing backup strategy — including branching, merge conflict resolution, CI/CD pipelines, browser-based editing, and session recording.
While backup tools answer "what changed?", SDA answers "how do we develop, review, approve, and deploy changes safely at scale?"
What happens if there's no internet connection available?
SDA is built to keep working even when the network isn't. Because the platform supports fully on-premise and air-gapped deployment, engineers can continue using version control, backup, and PLC editing entirely within the local OT network — with no dependency on an outbound internet connection. Changes made offline are captured in the local version history and can sync once connectivity is restored, so a lost connection never means a lost changelog or an unprotected deployment window.