On-Prem AI Deployment Checklist: 30 Points Before Go-Live
This checklist covers the 30 items that separate successful on-prem AI deployments from stalled ones, distilled from Netray's implementations for aerospace, defense, and discrete manufacturers. Self-hosting an LLM is not the hard part - a capable engineer can serve a model in an afternoon. Production readiness is the hard part: permission-aware retrieval, accreditation sign-off, tested rollback, and an adoption plan. Work through the five groups before go-live, and treat every critical item as a blocking gate, because each one marks a failure mode we have seen sink real deployments.
0 of 30 items complete
8 critical items still open - these are the highest-risk gaps.
Use Case and Data Readiness
Hardware and Infrastructure
Security and Compliance
Model Serving and MLOps
Rollout and Adoption
Score yourself by group. Any unchecked critical item is a launch blocker regardless of overall score - critical items cover the failure modes that cause security incidents or dead-on-arrival deployments. 25+ items checked with all criticals complete means you are genuinely ready for production go-live.
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How the checklist is organized
The five groups follow deployment dependency order. Use case and data readiness comes first because infrastructure decisions inherit from workload decisions - sizing hardware before scoping use cases is how GPUs end up idle. Hardware and infrastructure covers the physical layer most teams over-focus on. Security and compliance is where regulated manufacturers stall longest, so its items start early even though they finish late. Model serving and MLOps turns a working demo into an operable service. Rollout and adoption exists because the most common on-prem AI failure is not technical - it is a perfectly functional system nobody uses after week two.
Why the critical items are critical
Roughly a quarter of the items are flagged critical because they represent unrecoverable or high-cost failures rather than routine gaps. They share a theme: each is cheap to handle before launch and expensive or reputation-damaging to retrofit after.
- Permission-aware retrieval: a RAG system that leaks documents across access boundaries is a security incident, not a bug
- Accreditation sign-off: deploying before security approval can invalidate an ATO and freeze the whole program
- Quantization validation: silent quality loss discovered by users destroys trust faster than any outage
- Sizing from measured concurrency: spec-sheet sizing produces either idle capex or launch-day queue collapse
How to use your score
Run the checklist twice: once at project kickoff to build the workplan, and again as a go/no-go gate two weeks before launch. At kickoff, expect to check fewer than a third of items - the unchecked list is your project plan, already sequenced by group. At the gate, apply the scoring note strictly: all critical items complete plus 25 or more total is a launch; missing criticals mean a delay, and history says the delay is cheaper than the incident. Groups scoring lowest tell you where to add specialist help - security-heavy gaps and MLOps gaps call for different reinforcements.
Where Netray fits
Netray delivers on-prem AI deployments against exactly this checklist - it is a condensed version of our internal delivery gates. We handle the items teams most often lack in-house: permission-aware RAG architecture, accreditation-ready documentation for CMMC and ITAR environments, hardened vLLM serving with tested rollback, and adoption programs with measured baselines. Engagements can cover the full checklist or reinforce the specific groups where your self-assessment scored lowest, and every deployment ends with your team trained to operate the stack independently.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to get from zero checked items to launch-ready?
For a mid-market manufacturer with existing IT maturity, 10-16 weeks is typical: two to three weeks on use-case scoping and data readiness, four to six on infrastructure and security in parallel, three to four on serving and MLOps, and two on pilot rollout. Air-gapped or accreditation-bound environments add time on the security group - sometimes substantially - which is why those items should start the first week, not the last.
Which checklist group do teams most commonly underestimate?
Rollout and adoption, by a wide margin. Teams treat go-live as the finish line when it is the starting line: without trained champions, workflow-specific guidance, and a feedback loop, usage peaks in week one and decays to a handful of enthusiasts by month two. The second most-skipped area is the gold evaluation set - without it, every model refresh and quantization decision becomes an argument of opinions instead of a measurement.
Can I launch a pilot without completing every item?
Yes - a scoped pilot with 20-30 users can run before items like expansion criteria or full capacity headroom are complete. What a pilot cannot skip are the critical security items: permission-aware retrieval, access control, accreditation sign-off, and an acknowledged acceptable-use policy apply from the first user, because a pilot that leaks a controlled document is precisely as serious an incident as a production system doing it.
Work the checklist, then bring your lowest-scoring groups to Netray's on-prem AI team to close them before go-live.
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