Managed Cloud vs Self-Hosted Cloud vs On-Premises for Manufacturing Data

When I first started Instrumental in 2015, I was told by many brands and manufacturers: “There is no way we would ever put our manufacturing data into the cloud.” Full stop.

My response then is the same as it is now: “You will if there’s enough value to doing so.”

Fast forward a decade and a few things have changed:

• Awareness of the power of AI has made it clear that AI will transform manufacturing, but a pre-requisite is having an accessible and organized dataset. So even if those AIs don’t exist today, it’s widely acknowledged that they will come, so it’s valuable to start getting the datasets ready now.
• Cloud technology has continued to mature, providing a wide variety of highly secure options, such as ITAR and FedRAMP–compliant cloud products.
• On-premises technology has stagnated – new technologies are not being developed for this platform and the operational overhead remains high.

Manufacturing data is inherently multi-premise – it must be in the cloud

Instrumental’s vision has always been to tie together and extract value from the digital exhaust of the NPI and manufacturing process – across SKUs, products, lines, global sites, and many suppliers. Our most valuable work since our inception has been in manufacturing processes with multi-site scale – such as capturing data from upstream suppliers, FATP, and returns and refurbishment – or in capturing data from multiple SKUs, lines, and factory sites. Since manufacturing is inherently a “cause and effect” process – you want both the “causes” from upstream and the “effects” from downstream in the same system to analyze. By its very nature, this is a problem that cannot be constrained to one “premise” – it’s multi-premise. On-premises will not be the future of manufacturing data. It’s got to be in the cloud.

For many companies, managed, multi-tenant clouds using state-of-the-art security and separation protocols work great. They benefit from aggregating manufacturing data across many sites, massive cloud scalability, and access to cutting-edge technologies that deploy and provide payback within weeks.

But there are many very valid reasons to need to keep data on-premises: contractual requirements, compliance, regulations, etc. So, what should a leader do?

Get off the sidelines with Self-Hosted Cloud for manufacturing data

There are a few reasons managed cloud may not be tenable for your business:

• Perhaps the underlying data is your customer’s data. You can use it to improve their product, but to bring in a third-party technology will require a painful three-way negotiation.
• You have contractual requirements that prohibit allowing the data to leave your systems, or uncapped liability if you do so.
• Standards like ITAR, NIST SP 800-171, FedRAMP have specific restrictions on access and controls that commercial systems cannot handle – it’s a non-starter.

Unfortunately, these have left many manufacturers on the sidelines of all of the activity and benefits of using third parties for manufacturing analytics and manufacturing AI. The cutting-edge advances in technologies are not being built for on-premises platforms.

The answer is simple: if a managed cloud cannot work for your business, a self-hosted one probably can.

How does a Self-Hosted Cloud work for manufacturing data?

In a self-hosted cloud environment, your IT team creates an isolated cloud environment – such as inside your organization’s implementation of AWS. Your third-party vendor deploys a copy of their software to run within that environment and to connect everything up to internal and external services or sub-processors. Your IT team controls all administrative access to the cloud environment, and everything coming in and going out, so they are able to ensure it meets all regulatory, security, and compliance requirements. Your may allow your vendor to have temporary access to certain elements of the environment or the software itself, but you maintain complete control of your data.

Instrumental’s Self-Hosted Cloud offering

You can run Instrumental’s manufacturing data and AI platform in either an Instrumental-managed cloud environment or a self-hosted environment. Why might you choose one or the other?

Instrumental’s secure, managed cloud environment is well-suited for companies who value speed and maximizing the ROI of a technology implementation. Part of Instrumental’s service includes the operational management of the cloud environment and data processing – so you don’t need IT team involvement to get set-up and running. The cloud environment itself meets or exceeds best practices for enterprise cloud security and a new program can be up and running in days. Getting support or updates is fast and easy. These implementations are also cheaper because the operational costs of administering them are shared amongst many customers. Instrumental provides both commercial and ITAR-compliant GovCloud managed environments.

Instrumental’s self-host option for AWS is well-suited for companies with contractual, regulatory, or compliance requirements that cannot be met in one of our managed environments. It maintains the benefits of a cloud environment by allowing aggregation of data from multiple places but remains within your castle of security and compliance. Your environment will typically have bespoke requirements, leading to higher costs and a longer duration for implementation. You’ll also be paying AWS directly to host your environment. However, once implemented, your team will have instantaneous access to their data and Instrumental’s powerful AI tools. You’ll still be able to enjoy remote support from our world-class team of experts and a strong return on your technology investment.

If you would like to learn more, speak with a build better engineer.