Yannick
Why your factory can’t wait for the cloud
Management wants innovation: AI, predictive maintenance, centralized dashboards. IT wants centralized management, standardized infrastructure, and predictable costs. But the factory runs on systems that cannot tolerate a single millisecond of delay, at locations where internet connections may be unreliable.
Move everything to the public cloud? Too slow, too expensive, too dependent. Keep everything local the traditional way? No centralized management, no standardization, and no path toward innovation.
This is the tension where many manufacturing companies get stuck.
One of our clients produces animal feed at locations worldwide. Some of those locations are truly remote: production sites in Africa where internet connections are unreliable and local IT staff is not available. At the same time, the head office in the Netherlands wants centralized control over all operations.
They ran into three problems. First, management: with traditional infrastructure, you have to configure, update, and troubleshoot per location. That does not scale when you manage dozens of sites. Second, innovation: they wanted Infrastructure as Code, streamlined deployment, and AI for process monitoring. Their existing infrastructure was blocking that. Third, latency: MES systems need to run locally, close to the machines. A pure public cloud solution was not an option.
The solution was Azure Local. The platform runs physically in the factory but is connected to Azure. This allows the IT team in the Netherlands to manage all locations from a single management environment: monitoring, updates, policy management, and alerting for every site.
Management overhead dropped through automatic updates and integration with the hardware vendor. Systems are prepared by Splitbrain and are plug-and-play on arrival at the remote location. At the same time, MES systems continue to run locally, with the low latency that production processes require.
Centralized control over worldwide operations, without depending on local staff. A single management environment for all locations. And a path toward cloud innovation such as Infrastructure as Code, AI, and predictive maintenance, without disrupting production.
The smart factory market is expected to grow at 9 to 10% per year. Industrial AI, real-time process monitoring, and predictive maintenance are becoming standard in manufacturing. That growth does not happen by itself: it requires infrastructure that bridges the gap between cloud and factory floor.
Are you working on a hardware refresh or a migration away from VMware? Get in touch to discuss the options.
This article is part of the longread Factory of the Future.
Yannick de Koeijer
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