Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

SCADA Architecture: Cloud vs Plant Floor Best Practices

27 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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In this segment, the presenter addresses the common dilemma of where to locate SCADA systems within an industrial architecture—on the plant floor or in the cloud. He argues that for cloud deployment to be advantageous, critical data must be segregated for security and cost reasons. An intermediate layer should remain on the plant floor to handle real‑time control, while the cloud is leveraged primarily for redundancy and backup, providing resilience against catastrophic on‑site failures.

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If you ask a guy about putting in, you know, where to put the SCADA in the architecture of things, you know, do I put it on the plant floor or do I put it in the cloud? You know, those type of discussions. And in my mind, for the cloud to be beneficial, you have to segregate out the data that is important, not only for security, but also just for the cost and then keeping that That in-between layer on the plant floor and then maybe have your redundancy in the cloud so that you can have a backup as opposed to, you know, if you have that catastrophic failure that's on the plant floor, the cloud gives you that opportunity.