Currently, the classical hardware architecture of their construction has been established in distributed control systems for continuous technological processes and productions in various agricultural complexes and industries. Such an architecture has a number of disadvantages, in particular, the presence of a large number of different data bus standards at different levels of the platform architecture, which often complicates the integration of individual parts of the system. Modern automation systems are developing rapidly, which leads to the need for new system functionality that classical architecture cannot provide. (Research purpose) The research purpose is developing a concept of hardware architecture of distributed control systems for continuous industrial production and agricultural complexes using modern technologies and practices of the industrial Internet of Things. (Materials and methods) Used open sources of international communities in the field of automation and industrial Internet of Things, domestic and foreign scientific publications. The following methods were applied: decomposition by automation levels; decomposition by functionality performed by individual hardware components of the system; generalization of information from modern sources on the subject of research; formalization of the hardware structure in the form of circuit diagrams. (Results and discussion) We have proposed a basic hardware diagram of the IIoT platform for a distributed control system based on IIoT industrial Internet of Things technologies. We have made the main vector in the development of the architecture based on the use of the Ethernet data bus at all levels of the platform, as well as on the implementation of modern and necessary IIoT functions. (Conclusions) It has been shown that the classical hardware architecture of distributed management systems for agricultural complexes and continuous production has proven itself well, however, the need to introduce new functionality and awareness of the need to use unified data transmission buses at all levels of the enterprise leads to the development and gradual transition to new IIoT architectural models for the design and development of such systems. We analyzed the existing global trends in this area and proposed an up-to-date and modern concept of the hardware architecture of IIoT distributed systems.