SCADA systems have the necessary drivers to communicate with the field devices of the factory floor through their legacy communication protocols or, more often, through OPC or a fieldbus protocol. Typical data acquisition intervals for SCADA applications are in the range of half a second to one minute.

A small-to-medium-sized SCADA system typically handles thousands of process signals, adopting a common approach for processing information based on a common set of parameters that are necessary for the correct management of the information. These parameters include the tag name, a description, the sampling time, a minimum and a maximum value, and engineering units.