Many automation require that controls engineers log the data they gather. Regardless of whether this is done to follow certain laws and regulations, or simply as a feature of a particular product, the fact is that data must somehow be stored.
In the past, before modern automation, there were many ways to do this. People would be paid to go to each machine and write down the numbers on a clipboard. Chart recorders were utilized where appropriate. Sometimes data wasn’t recorded at all.
Meanwhile, big companies at the beginning of the information age wanted better ways to track things such as sales, inventory and accounting statistics. The development of databases, where large sets of data could be stored securely and retrieved reliably, changed the landscape of the workplace. Soon, employees punched their data into a computer, which in turn entered the data into the appropriate place in the database. Gone were the warehouses of file cabinets, replaced by server rooms. The emergence of widespread networking allowed people to make use of this stored treasure chest of data, resulting in an entirely new era of sales analytics and marketing tools.
refer to:
http://www.automation.com/leveraging-it-technology-for-industrial-controls-applications