SPONSORED BY: Integration Objects
The OPC UA ecosystem thrives on one promise: seamless, secure, and standardized communication across industrial and enterprise systems – regardless of vendor, platform, or underlying protocol. At Integration Objects, that promise is at the heart of everything we build into SIOTH®, our Smart IoT Highway platform for secure IT-OT integration. Today, we are proud to share what our latest release “SIOTH® 2.4.3” brings to the OPC UA community.
This release is more than a routine maintenance update. It represents a deliberate, substantial investment in OPC UA capabilities: from a modernized OPC UA Server core to enterprise-grade security, to expanded historian functionality and smarter connectivity.
Here is what’s new, and why it matters for the broader OPC UA ecosystem.
A More Powerful OPC UA Server at the Core
The SIOTH® OPC UA Server has been upgraded to deliver a more robust and standards-compliant foundation. This upgrade brings meaningful improvements in address space handling, subscription management, and overall server stability – including fixes for high memory usage scenarios involving large address spaces.
For system integrators and end users building on top of OPC UA, this means a more reliable server that scales to the demands of real industrial environments.
Enterprise Security: Because OPC UA Is Now Business-Critical Infrastructure
As OPC UA adoption grows across critical infrastructure sectors – energy, utilities, water treatment, manufacturing – the security bar has never been higher. SIOTH® 2.4.3 answers that call directly.
Two new security policies are now supported:
- Aes128Sha256RsaOaep
- Aes256Sha256RsaPss
These additions bring SIOTH® in full alignment with modern OPC UA security specifications, enabling encrypted, authenticated communication that meets the requirements of today’s most demanding compliance frameworks.
Beyond encryption, this release introduces:
- User management: granular control over who can connect to your OPC UA Server and with what permissions
- Audit trail: a full, tamper-evident log of user actions on the server; indispensable for regulated industries
- Role-based access control (RBAC), tightened ensuring Security Admin, Configure Admin, and Authenticated User roles each carry exactly the right privileges – no more, no less
- Reverse connection: enabling OPC UA servers behind firewalls to initiate connections to clients, solving a persistent network architecture challenge in industrial deployments
Together, these features position SIOTH® and its Universal OPC UA Server as a genuinely enterprise-ready OPC UA Server; one that IT security teams and operational technology (OT) managers can confidently deploy side by side.
Advanced Alarm Management: Bringing OPC UA Alarms & Conditions to Life
One of OPC UA’s most powerful, and often underutilized capabilities is its Alarms & Conditions (A&C) model. SIOTH® 2.4.3 makes this model significantly more accessible and configurable.
What’s new in alarm management:
- Configurable alarm conditions: define exactly what triggers an alarm, tailored to your process and operations
- Static and dynamic (tag-based) alarm thresholds: thresholds can now follow live tag values, enabling adaptive alarming that reflects real process behavior
- New alarm settings: On Delay, Off Delay, and Deadband – giving engineers precise control over alarm behavior and reducing nuisance alarms
- Area management: organize alarms hierarchically by plant area or equipment group, consistent with the OPC UA A&C information model
- Mass alarms configuration: download, import, and export alarm configurations in bulk, dramatically reducing configuration time for large tag sets
For OPC UA practitioners, this means SIOTH® now delivers a production-grade implementation of OPC UA A&C – not just connectivity, but real alarm lifecycle management.
Historian Capabilities: OPC UA Historical Access, Expanded
Historical data access (HDA) is a cornerstone of OPC UA’s value in industrial settings. SIOTH® 2.4.3 significantly extends its historian capabilities:
- Group-based archiving: archive multiple tags as a group, triggered either on data change or on a periodic schedule
- Enable/disable historian groups on the fly: without restarting the server or interrupting live data flow
- Multi-database historian support: InfluxDB (with configurable retention), SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL are all supported as historian backends
- Continuation point support for HA/HE: properly handling large historical data batches, a requirement for high-density deployments
These improvements mean that SIOTH® doesn’t just expose historical data over OPC UA HDA, it actively manages the archiving pipeline behind it, making it a complete historian solution, not just a connector.
>> Learn more about OPC UA Universal Server
About Integration Objects
Integration Objects is an OPC Foundation member and a provider of industrial connectivity and IIoT solutions. SIOTH® (Smart IoT Highway) is our flagship platform for industrial data integration, supporting OPC UA, OPC DA, OPC HDA, OPC AE, MQTT, Modbus, DNP3, and more and for Augmented AI applications combines rules, expert knowledge, workflows, generative AI and analytics.
Learn more: www.integrationobjects.com