In-depth Software Development InformationTwitter: @ericjbrunoEmail: eric@ericbruno.com |
Eric J. Bruno
October 2, 2015
Extend Your IoT Data Reach with the Cloud
The Internet of Things (IoT) is part of a promising future where smart computing devices will communicate with one another, with people, and with the enterprise applications we use. But IoT value is in the data, reaching from the enterprise out to realize the tremendous potential at our fingertips. This data-centric view of IoT requires the integration of new data services, the injection of intelligence into our devices, and the interconnections with enterprise systems.
Soon, we’ll see growing numbers of devices and systems connected in ways we haven’t yet imagined, requiring us to handle a wider variety of data types with even greater volume and velocity. To use IoT to discover what’s truly important and relevant to your business and your users, you need to have the right IT capabilities. The technical requirements and data volumes introduced are best met by the cloud, which surpasses traditional data center implementations in multiple dimensions.
Devices and sensors are a means to acquire valuable data, and IoT applications often require a distributed set of services to act on that data. The timely, contextual data, along with the cloud, are so crucial to IoT, they essentially transform and extend enterprise architecture beyond what we know today. Although on-premise enterprise application infrastructure has much in common with IoT infrastructure requirements in terms of technology, it’s the cloud that solves many of the challenges head-on.
IoT Challenges and Barriers to Entry
Up until more recently, one major challenge enterprises faced when trying to deploy an IoT project was configuring and integrating the myriad of devices and the numerous—and sometimes competing—protocols required. While devices and their challenges receive a lot of focus in IoT, there are other challenges that are just as important. These challenges include the need to deploy dedicated servers, middleware, databases and analytics packages for an IoT application, with potentially different communications solutions for each device type used. This accounts for a great deal of infrastructure and cost, potentially multiplied by each IoT solution deployed.
Other challenges include systems integration, security, data aggregation, data management and analytics, and scalability and elasticity.
IoT Business Concerns
As with any technology implementation, the motivation behind IoT applications begins with business drivers and concerns. First, you need to identify the business of IoT and focus on customer value and return on investment (ROI). Part of this process is identifying how to deliver value quickly, to both your business and your customers.
Here's a set of business concerns for any IoT application, which need to be directly addressed in the solution:
IoT and Interconnected Services
The next step is to identify the top priorities, beginning with what’s most important to customers now while preparing for the future. For example, outline a growth strategy for your IoT solution, understand how to respond to critical problems such as communication and power failures, intermittent connectivity, and ultimately how to improve the solution with fixes and added functionality.
It helps to have an agile, iterative process to IoT development, where the most important items are built and delivered early, with user feedback gathered along the way. The reward is in the ability to learn quickly and make minor course corrections sooner, and more often. The challenge is finding a development platform that can support this without overwhelming cost and effort. Let’s examine how the cloud can be the best choice for IoT.
The Advantages of the Cloud for IoT
IoT is a trendy technology topic, and most agree it holds a lot of promise. But there’s a risk that one-off IoT solutions based on existing on-premise IT cost too much to support proof of concept projects, take too long to deploy, and threaten to stifle innovation. According to IDC, within the next five years, over 90% of all IoT data will be hosted on service provider platforms as cloud computing reduces the complexity of supporting IoT "Data Blending".
The cloud is one answer to achieving an agile and iterative development platform, further enabling you to achieve the promise of IoT. For instance, the cloud is always there and always on, reducing development and deployment bottlenecks (think DevOps). It does this by providing the resources and capacity needed, with reliability, operational efficiency, and near unlimited bandwidth.
In general, the cloud can deliver a global, nimble solution base, lower maintenance overhead, best-in-class security, and an overall reduction in risk. It’s also flexible, cost effective, scalable and elastic, and can decrease time to market. A quick comparison between the IoT business concerns listed above and the value of the cloud reveals that they’re a near-perfect match. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of the cloud and how it matches the specific business needs of IoT.
The IoT Cloud Business Advantage
With visibility into your entire set of services, a cloud provider can properly secure and optimize traffic to meet your global bandwidth needs. The cloud can further improve uptime and performance through adaptive traffic management, protocol and data normalization (for the varieties of IoT device communication and data), deep application visibility, and dedicated focus on quality of service (QoS) agreements.
Here are some direct advantages the cloud offers IoT:
The Cloud Improves Economics
With a pay-as-you-go model of buying cloud resources—instead of the large capital expenditures associated with building out your own datacenters—you pay only for what you need when you need it. Cloud subscriptions move you to an amortized model for IT expenses. As a result, you pay for an outcome (with an SLA) as opposed to technology resources. Add to this the savings of outsourcing monitoring and support, improved tools and processes for software deployments, and layers of virtualization and elasticity provided.
There are other benefits of not operating your own IT datacenter, such as savings in power, cooling, and telecommunications costs. These non-essential business items are deferred to a cloud provider who specializes in offering this as a service, with related management and expenses spread out over many of its own customers. As a result of these changed economics, IT resources mutate from something that’s rationed, into a set of services that are effectively unlimited yet affordable.
The IoT Cloud Security Advantage
Security is often at the top of the list of most organizations’ IoT challenges. This includes the perceived risks involved in allowing your cloud provider to become the caretaker of your information. Others back this view, illustrating how security continues to be at the top of the list of concerns for IoT, both for organizations building solutions and their users. For some, IoT security is so much of concern that entire studies have been conducted on the topic.
Depending on the capabilities of the provider you chose, an enterprise could actually improve the overall security compared to what it might otherwise be able to resource on its own. For example, the centralization of the cloud makes it easier to integrate device and user identity into an IoT workflow. Existing enterprise identity security can be leveraged for devices to solve security issues around authentication, authorization, and access control is a uniform way. Additionally, some providers offer advanced security threat analytics based on the large volumes of data and traffic they’ve handled for years.
The top five sets of security-related questions you should ask of any cloud service provider:
The IoT Cloud Data and Analytics Advantage
Cloud-resident technologies enable the efficient collection, storage, preparation, and analysis of all the data assets of an organization. With the rapid adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and the accumulation of IoT data at unprecedented rates, most of it has also moved to the cloud. This is known as data gravity, which implies that as your data gathers in one place, supporting services are often built around it, and vice versa.
With this shift of data gravity, powerful yet easy to use cloud-based analytics has become paramount. The reasons are several:
In each of these cases, the cloud helps provide distributed application provisioning, end-user remote device and data management, security and regulatory adherence, centralized data storage and lookup, and comprehensive analytics. In addition, the cloud is critical in providing global communication channels for the wide rollouts needed in IoT solutions. Arguably, no on-premise IoT solution will offer a cost effective, complete, and robust solution like the cloud.