A cloud gateway device facilitates collection of industrial data from one or more data sources on the plant floor and migration of the collected data to a cloud platform for storage and processing. The cloud gateway device collects historical, live, and/or alarm data directly from industrial devices networked to the gateway device, formats and encapsulates the data with customer-specific header information, and sends the resulting data packets to a cloud platform for processing by cloud-level analytics services. To keep local memory requirements low, the cloud gateway device supports store-and-forward functionality in the event of a communication loss to the cloud platform, whereby the collected industrial data is redirected to an external data storage repository until communication to the cloud platform is reestablished.