I gave this talk at the GI-Fachgruppentreffen Architekturen 2013 at Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern on Monday: “Future industrial automation systems will execute a number of control and monitoring functions in central data centers. The cloud computing paradigm will reduce IT costs and enable small companies to flexibly automate production processes. Centralized control and monitoring across companies and domains will facilitate a novel smart ecosystem for industrial automation connecting both embedded devices and information systems. To realize this vision, a number of technical, economical, and social challenges need to be solved. This talk focuses on software architecture challenges for cloud-connected automation systems. It points out the architectural impact of critical non-functional properties, such as latency, security, and multi-tenancy.”