SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition)

SCADA is a category of control system software used to monitor and manage industrial processes across a wide geographic area — for example, a utility's SCADA system might oversee substations spread across an entire region from a single control room. SCADA systems collect real-time data from field equipment (via RTUs and PLCs) and give operators a centralized view and remote control over that equipment.

SCADA is the "supervisory" layer of a broader ICS environment: it doesn't run the physical machinery itself, but it's how human operators see what the machinery is doing and issue commands to it.