Manufacturers are converging on hybrid cloud architectures, and LNS Research finds the trend justified.

Real-time execution and control, including PLCs, SCADA systems, historians, and MES platforms running live work orders, require the local autonomy and deterministic performance that only proximity to the plant floor can provide.

Analytics, AI/ML training, and cross-site aggregation, by contrast, are workloads built for the cloud's elasticity and pooled compute.

Within that hybrid model, this LNS Research Spotlight report examines multi-tenancy specifically and argues it is frequently misapplied.

Multi-tenant architectures generate savings by pooling idle capacity across small, uncorrelated, bursty workloads; heavy, steady, high-cardinality industrial data streams do not fit that profile, leaving noisy-neighbor risk, shared blast radius, and superlinear cost scaling with little offsetting benefit.



This report distinguishes cloud adoption from multi-tenancy as a delivery choice, outlines where single-tenant, and customer-controlled instances are warranted.

Readers will receive a specific set of actionable recommendations for evaluating workload fit, sequencing resilience investment, and setting non-negotiable operational independence from the cloud.

Download the full report, available exclusively in the LNS Research Member Library.