SPONSORED BY: INTEGRATION OBJECTS
In the realm of industrial automation, OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) plays a critical role in ensuring seamless and secure communication between various devices and systems.
The industry’s drive to fully comply with cybersecurity standards has compelled industrial software application developers to either create OPC UA Client interfaces or transition from OPC Classic to OPC UA.
This shift is justified by two primary factors:
- Value in IT/OT Convergence: Integrating Information Technology (IT) with Operational Technology (OT) offers significant business benefit, but must align with strict cybersecurity policies and standards. OPC UA is a robust communication protocol that facilitates this integration, ensuring secure and reliable data exchange between IT and OT systems.
- Alignment with OPC UA Standards in OT Systems: With most OT systems now adopting OPC UA, IT application developers need to adapt their applications to maintain compatibility. Failure to do so could isolate their applications from the broader system, missing out on significant opportunities for their organization. The quicker these applications are developed and deployed, the more value they bring to end users.
Need to build your own OPC UA Client?
For developers aiming to build their own OPC UA Client, Integration Objects, a leader in IT-OT integration and industrial cyber security solutions, provides the OPC UA Client Toolkit product. This robust and optimized tool is designed for rapid development of OPC UA client applications in .NET environment.
This toolkit addresses the complexities of OPC UA, providing developers with the resources to create efficient and reliable OPC UA client software within a few steps.
- Integration Objects also recently released a new version of OPC UA Client Toolkit. This new version supports .NET Core version 3.1 and higher as well as .NET Framework version 4.6.1 and higher.
OPC UA Client Toolkit: Key features and benefits
The OPC UA Client Toolkit offers a comprehensive API designed for .NET, enabling developers, system integrators, and OEMs to rapidly program their OPC UA client application, allowing their systems to communicate with OPC UA Servers.
The OPC UA Client Toolkit is equipped with an array of features designed to enhance the development and functionality of OPC UA client applications. The toolkit supports automatic discovery of OPC UA servers on the network, making it easier to locate and connect to data sources. It efficiently handles both local and remote connections to multiple OPC UA servers. Secure sessions with OPC UA servers are easily established, ensuring that data exchanges are protected against unauthorized access. The toolkit facilitates the navigation of the OPC UA server’s address space, enabling users to explore the data structure and access necessary information.
Supporting read and write requests to variables, the toolkit enables real-time data interaction between the client application and the server. Users can monitor real-time data and manage alarms and conditions, ensuring timely responses to critical events. The toolkit also includes features for exploring and updating historical data, essential for analysis and reporting.
To ensure data integrity and confidentiality, the toolkit supports various security modes including None, Sign, and Sign & Encrypt, along with both XML and binary message encoding. Multiple security policies are supported, such as None, Basic128RSA15, Basic256, Basic256Sha256, Aes128_Sha256_RsaOaep, and Aes256_Sha256_RsaPss.
The toolkit package includes examples and sample source code in both C# .NET and VB .NET, supporting the development of 32-bit and 64-bit applications. It supports development in Visual Studio 2017 and higher.
Figure 1: OPC UA Client Toolkit Architecture
Get Started Today
With extensive features, detailed documentation, a free trial version, and reliable support, this OPC UA Client Toolkit is the ideal choice for developers looking to integrate OPC UA functionalities into their projects.
Need to build your own OPC UA Server?
In addition to OPC UA Client Toolkit, we also offer an OPC UA Server Toolkit. This toolkit provides the essential components needed to develop OPC UA server applications in C# .NET or VB .NET . It simplifies the programming process by handling all the necessary OPC UA details, allowing developers to focus on building their applications, without worrying about the intricacies of the OPC UA Standard.
About Integration Objects
Integration Objects is a world-leading industry 4.0 solutions provider for digital transformation, advanced solutions in machine learning and predictive analytics, integrated command & control centers, Cloud services, industrial internet of things (IIoT), cyber security, OPC and Big Data Analytics, for process, power and utilities industries, defense, and governmental institutions.