You want cameras watching a production line for defects, or sensors reading machine health, and someone asks: should this run on a box sitting in the factory, or go up to the cloud? Both are real options today, and the choice is not about which is more advanced — it is about your network, your speed needs, and what you are and are not comfortable sending outside the building.
When an on-site box makes sense
- A decision has to happen in under a second — stopping a line, rejecting a part — where a round trip to the cloud is too slow.
- Your factory's internet connection is not reliable enough to stream video continuously.
- Footage or readings are sensitive enough that you do not want them leaving the building at all.
When the cloud makes sense
- You need to see data across several factory locations in one dashboard.
- The analysis is not time-critical — a weekly trend, not a per-second alert.
- You would rather not manage hardware on-site at all, and your connectivity is solid.
What it costs you
An on-site box is an upfront hardware cost and someone locally who can handle a restart if it goes down, but no ongoing data transfer cost and no dependence on your internet line for the time-critical part. A cloud approach avoids hardware but depends entirely on connectivity, and data transfer costs grow with camera count. Many factories end up doing both — fast decisions on-site, trends and dashboards in the cloud — rather than picking one for everything. A useful test is to ask what happens to the on-site function during a two-hour internet outage; if the answer is "it stops", that function probably belongs on-site, not in the cloud.
Questions to ask any vendor
- What exactly runs on-site versus in the cloud, and why that split?
- What happens to the time-critical function if the internet goes down?
- Does footage or sensor data leave the building at all, and if so, where does it go?
How we can help
Kaappu is our models in a box that sits inside your factory, so vision and sensor data can be processed on-site with nothing leaving the building, alongside cloud dashboards where you want them. See it at /products/kaappu, and tell us about your line at talk to us.
