Hardware engineers belong to the groups of professionals that usually cannot work in their living rooms at home. Without the technical resources of an electronics lab, they are very limited in what they can do. RF developers in particular often need to access a number of measuring instruments that cannot be removed from a shared lab for long periods of time. Imagine how convenient it would be to perform measurements without having the measuring instrument in front of you. R & S®Cloud4Testing allows users to remotely analyze measurement data in detail. After their data is uploaded, they can use powerful tools to analyze parameters of interest in their mobile, radar or other signal data. If customers also want to generate the measurement data remotely, Such a cloud can be used for applications that range from collaborative work on development projects to training and demonstrations, and from optimizing the use of resources to offering T&M cloud services for third parties.
Remote control of test equipment has been standard practice in labs and system houses for many decades. Nowadays, even low-cost devices have the necessary interfaces, at least as options. Top-end devices often have built-in web servers, allowing them to be operated remotely from any browser. All that is needed is the IP address, and the device must be accessible online. For remote unattended measurement stations with a static setup, remote access and operation is already common practice. In all cases, it is important to have effective access protection with authentication mechanisms. This is not a problem in a protected lab environment, where remote control capability is often used for convenience to avoid having to constantly go back and forth between the workplace and a test allocated elsewhere. What these scenarios have in common is that they are one-off, special solutions that have to be reconfigured for each application. For those who want to take a broader approach to remote control of test equipment and make it a workable standard practice, a cloud based solution is an obvious approach.
Everything as a service (EAS) is the latest trend, and it is becoming more and more popular. Users of such services, most of which are based on cloud technology, save on capital expenditures because they do not have to maintain the underlying infrastructure and only pay for the services they actually use. In addition, these services are usually highly scalable, so users can count on the required capacity being available. A prerequisite for moving a service to the cloud is that it can be virtualized. At a virtual sales counter, the user simply books a service based on type, time, scope and quality. The cloud management system allocates the necessary resources.
Such systems, which are typically offered by large cloud operators for various tasks, can also be set up on a smaller scale for test and measurement services. These differ from typical software as a service (SaaS) solutions with regard to the type of service and the resources. A company that wants to virtually pool all or a part of its T&M equipment to make it accessible company-wide from any location only has a limited number of each type of T&M instrument in its portfolio, and unlike a server, each instrument can only be used for one measurement task at a time. Scalability is not the main consideration here. However, collaboration and remote access are increasingly important and necessary – now more than ever
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