Industrial Retrofitting

with the CloudRail.Box and secondary sensors

Industrial Retrofitting

The idea behind „industrial retrofitting“ or „secondary sensing“ is to equip old machines (brownfield) with additional sensors to gather data for IIoT applications like condition monitoring or predictive maintenance. These sensors are exclusively used for the IIoT use case and completely separated from the actual production environment. This means they are not connected to e.g. the PLC or fieldbus and have no impact on the actual process. Typical sensors are for example vibration, temperature, pressure, distance, buttons or simple actuators like tower lights.

Advantages of Retrofitting

No Security Risks

Since secondary sensors are not connected to the production system like a PLC or fieldbus, there is no risk of a) breaking machines and b) cyber attacks affecting the production.

Faster Realization

Touching a production environment is often tied to a complex process: Involving the right experts, convincing OT staff, extensive testing and much more. Secondary sensors can be quickly installed by maintenance engineers.

Reduced Costs

Even though there are costs for additional sen- sors, retrofitting usually comes with significantly lower costs compared to touching a production system. This is due to high costs for experts which are, for example, necessary to change a PLC program or higher testing requirements.

Better Data Quality

Existing sensors often are parametrized for the specific use case (controlling the process) and thus only deliver a binary signal (1 or 0). This is often not enough data for IIoT projects. Secondary sensors on the other hand deliver the raw data.

CloudRail for Retrofitting

The CloudRail.Box allows you to easily connect over 12.000 professional industrial sensors from almost any manufacturer to cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, SAP and many more. There is a sensors for almost any use case available. Thanks to CloudRail’s unique Plug&Play approach, it takes less than a minute to connect any sensor the the cloud: Plug-in the sensor, select the cloud, done! Learn more

Over 12.000 Industrial Sensors

With over 12.000 supported sensors, there is the right sensor for any use case. CloudRail relies on professional industrial sensors which are precise, reliable and can be used even in extremely harsh environments.


Connecting a sensor with CloudRail just takes less than a minute and doesn’t require any domain specific knowledge. This makes IIoT projects fast and inexpensive.

Managed Solution

All CloudRail.Box devices are managed centrally through a device management cloud. This allows you to build fast PoC which can easily scale to millions of secure and reliable installations.

Edge Computing

Execute logic right on the CloudRail.Box to achieve extremely fast executions or aggregate data before sending it to the Cloud. Even machine learning is possible.

Learn more about the CloudRail solution.