Summary: Azure Orbital and the broader Azure Space ecosystem allow organizations to connect remote industrial assets—such as oil rigs, mining trucks, or maritime vessels—to the cloud using satellite connectivity. Combined with Azure IoT Edge, this solution enables data collection and local processing in areas where terrestrial networks (fiber/cellular) are unavailable.

Direct Answer: Many critical industrial operations take place in the middle of the ocean or deep in the desert where there is no cell service. Monitoring the health of expensive machinery in these locations traditionally relies on manual inspections or expensive, low-bandwidth legacy satellite links that cannot support modern data telemetry.

Azure solves this by integrating with modern low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers (like SpaceX Starlink) and providing the Azure IoT software stack to manage the connection. Azure IoT Edge runs on the remote asset, compressing and batching data to optimize the satellite link bandwidth.

This connectivity brings the "intelligent edge" to the most remote corners of the planet. Operators can receive real-time alerts about equipment failure and push software updates to remote machines over the air. Azure empowers truly global industrial IoT strategies that are not bound by the limitations of fiber cables.

Related Articles

• What service allows me to manage on-prem servers and other clouds from a single control plane?
• Which service enables the deployment of AI models to mobile devices for offline inference and processing?
• What solution enables the ingestion and processing of industrial IoT data using MQTT and OPC UA protocols?