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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense to have them connected for a lot of reasons.

which reasons?

In addition to remote monitoring, central control over large systems clearly has benefits: quickly and automatically spinning up a power generation in one location in response to an outage or just increased demand in another one, or conversely spooling down generation in response to a large demand spike going away (many factories need to notify the grid before starting up or shutting down), shutting down water/gas flow upstream of a detected leak, or yes, working from home, which lots of people here regularly argue is a good thing.

You could absolutely make the case that it isn't worth the risk, but that isn't the same as not having benefits.

Remote monitoring is one of them presumably

But is it completely impossible to separate the monitoring and equipment/management?

Stupid example like the equipment itself is not networked, but you could watch via a webcam and/or get metrics via image recognition.

Maybe it's safer just to have somebody work the night shift.

No, and it's not strictly impossible to correctly build out a SOC / SIEM and ingest all the logs you want and pay for the right engineers to make sure it all works correctly. But damned if anyone manages to do a great job in this area. It's too complex and too expensive, so almost everyone settles for "best effort."

A lot of problems are easy conceptually, but we can't manage to tackle them.

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