One or more computer-readable storage media having program instructions stored thereon to perform cloud-based data processing and analysis in an industrial automation environment, wherein the program instructions, when executed by a computing system, direct the computing system to at least: store in an on-premise local cache operational data generated by at least one industrial machine (111; 311, 312), each piece of information in the operational data being described by individual data tags; in an on-premise cloud agent, transfer the operational data for storage in an unstructured data storage system (121; 521) in a cloud-based architecture (120; 320; 520); in the cloud-based architecture, process the operational data to convert the operational data to a structured format and store the operational data in the structured format in an SQL database (123; 523); and in the cloud-based architecture, receive a request for an analytics action, and in response, extract at least a portion of the operational data from the SQL database and execute the analytics action on the at least the portion of the operational data, wherein, to execute the analytics action on the at least the portion of the operational data, the program instructions direct the computing system to retrieve analytics processing instructions and analytics parameters based on information included in the at least the portion of the operational data, the information comprising tag names and time stamps, characterized in that the cloud environment has access to a tag manifest and a metrics manifest, wherein the tag manifest contains a list of tags with an associated analytical hierarchy, wherein the analytical hierarchy defines which tags are used in specific analysis calculations, and wherein constant parameters, thresholds and other values to be used in the analytics calculations are specified in the metrics manifest, wherein the extracting of at least a portion of the operational data comprises extracting a list of tags from the tag manifest associated with the specific analytics action to run on them, and extracting the relevant operational data from the SQL database based on the extracted tag names, wherein constants and thresholds involved in the specific analytics action are obtained from the metrics manifest. store in an on-premise local cache operational data generated by at least one industrial machine (111; 311, 312), each piece of information in the operational data being described by individual data tags; in an on-premise cloud agent, transfer the operational data for storage in an unstructured data storage system (121; 521) in a cloud-based architecture (120; 320; 520); in the cloud-based architecture, process the operational data to convert the operational data to a structured format and store the operational data in the structured format in an SQL database (123; 523); and in the cloud-based architecture, receive a request for an analytics action, and in response, extract at least a portion of the operational data from the SQL database and execute the analytics action on the at least the portion of the operational data, wherein, to execute the analytics action on the at least the portion of the operational data, the program instructions direct the computing system to retrieve analytics processing instructions and analytics parameters based on information included in the at least the portion of the operational data, the information comprising tag names and time stamps, characterized in that the cloud environment has access to a tag manifest and a metrics manifest, wherein the tag manifest contains a list of tags with an associated analytical hierarchy, wherein the analytical hierarchy defines which tags are used in specific analysis calculations, and wherein constant parameters, thresholds and other values to be used in the analytics calculations are specified in the metrics manifest, wherein the extracting of at least a portion of the operational data comprises extracting a list of tags from the tag manifest associated with the specific analytics action to run on them, and extracting the relevant operational data from the SQL database based on the extracted tag names, wherein constants and thresholds involved in the specific analytics action are obtained from the metrics manifest.