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Choosing your Industrial Edge Device

Industrial Edge Devices (IE Devices) are physical or virtual devices operating at the field level. IE Devices record data generated by automation systems, store the automation data locally, and upload it to a cloud infrastructure of your choice, such as Insights Hub, AWS, Azure, or local data lakes. Later, you can also deploy and run apps on the IE Device.

Siemens offers physical and virtual IE Devices to facilitate Edge computing in production environments.

Find a full overview of devices compatible with Siemens Industrial Edge here. Refer to the Industrial Edge Device documentation for more information about a specific IE Device.

Ensure your chosen IE Device is compatible with your desired IE Connector Apps and connectivity protocols.

Understanding the onboarding process

IE Devices must be onboarded to an Industrial Edge Management (IEM) instance. IE Devices cannot be onboarded to more than one IEM instance.

The onboarding process connects IE Devices to the IEM instance and configures settings, e.g. device type, login credentials, etc. First create a device configuration file to define settings for the IE Device in IEM and save the configuration file on a local computer. Use the configuration file to activate and onboard the IE Device. This connection is initiated by the IE Device and is outbound from the secure network, avoiding any inbound connections. Allowing IEM to initiate inbound connections increases the attack surface and creates a security risk.

Physical IE Devices and virtual IE Devices are designed for different use cases. However, both require a configuration file for the onboarding process.

What's next?

The steps to configure and onboard an IE Device depend on the chosen hardware.