Remote Kill‑Switch Immunity for Industrial Automation

Atlas Automation — Industrial IoT / Manufacturing

Executive Summary

Sovereign edge control replaced cloud‑locked PLC dependencies, eliminating remote kill‑paths and stabilizing production. Uptime across critical cells improved materially while onboarding times dropped from days to hours. All control logic and keys remain on‑prem under audited change governance.

Challenge

Cloud‑mediated PLC APIs exposed plants to unilateral vendor shutdowns and policy shifts.
WAN instability interrupted telemetry and diagnostics, prolonging outages across constrained cells.
Compliance required auditable change control without opaque vendor black boxes.

Sovereign Architecture Solution

Open‑firmware controllers with deterministic update windows and local safety interlocks.
On‑prem historian and dashboards preserve operations during WAN loss; sovereign key custody.
Signed artifacts, SBOM tracking, and Testing‑on‑the‑Toilet checks at each changeover.

Results

27% uptime improvement in constrained cells over two quarters.
Zero vendor kill‑paths; all control logic and cryptographic keys retained on‑prem.
Onboarding time reduced >90% (from ~16 hours to <2 hours).