IoT
“The most boring gadgets in our lives can talk to each other wirelessly, perform tasks on command, provide us with data like never before” – the Technology magazine WIRED once commented on the peak of the technological revolution. That is undeniable. In particular, the Internet of Things is developing explosively and occupying the leading position with the scale covering most of the industry fields and creating turning points in economic development at the macro level as well as individual business growth. In recent years, the shift from on-premises to cloud services has spurred global IoT to meet the very needs, especially when the amount of data and the number of connected devices is massive. That’s why when looking for customized IoT development services for their IT projects, businesses pay special attention to the IoT cloud platform. Learn about the IoT cloud platform and how to choose the best cloud service by following the following article.
What is the IoT Cloud Platform?
First of all, it is important to understand that the way the Internet of Things works is to connect physical objects to a network and allow them to communicate, cooperate, and act automatically and intelligently without the need for intervention from humans. More specifically, each IoT environment combines technologies from different vendors, serves as a meeting point for connected devices, and serves to collect and process data. That means this environment needs a common platform for integration, more specifically, a cloud platform. The cloud platform acts as a middle technology consisting of multiple layers that monitor different processes and support data transfer between utilities and allow organizations to control all IoT-connected devices with the help of the Internet.
Benefits of using IoT cloud platform
Compared to setting up in-house IT infrastructure on-premises, IoT-driven businesses can gain many outstanding advantages, including cost optimization, data portability, time market, and security using the IoT cloud platform.
Cost-effective:
To set up and deploy the Internet of Things internally requires an upfront investment in setting up on-premises server infrastructure that is expensive, vulnerable, and difficult to scale. In addition, there is the issue of ongoing hardware and IT personnel maintenance costs, not to mention the risk of business disruption due to errors. Meanwhile, choosing some white-labeled ready-to-use IoT platforms is a great choice to avoid these costly and unnecessary expenses, instead, put this investment on increasing product profitability. There are no major trade-offs in terms of functionality, even ready-to-use platforms have the ability to customize to your needs. Obviously, choosing a suitable ready-made IoT cloud platform will simplify the development process, and save money than doing it yourself, or hiring a developer to design IoT application software from scratch.
Scalability:
Integrating IoT systems into the cloud gives you easy scalability and flexibility in the future. Imagine with an on-premises infrastructure, once the need to expand appears, you will have to invest in hardware equipment purchases, and perform configuration efforts to ensure all devices work and connect stably. Conversely, if you want to reduce the number of IoT-enabled devices on the system or reduce storage needs, you have to take a waste of cutting. Meanwhile, pushing your system to the cloud means you rent a virtual server from a third party. You have more scalability, whether it adds more cloud space or cuts down on connected devices. The implementation is completely quick, the cost of change is only a fraction and avoids the risk of disrupting operations or services that could lead to huge losses.
Flexibility
The cloud platform can help your devices communicate bilaterally with large amounts of data, from device to cloud and vice versa, anywhere globally and regardless of infrastructure or network. This makes more sense as you can remotely update and process real-time data, and provision and manage IoT devices in a non-traditional way.
Time to market
Cloud-based IoT infrastructure helps businesses solve time-to-market problems when it doesn’t require too much time to deploy data management analytics capabilities or upgrade network topology if needed. Instead, the only effort required is to customize the platform accordingly, and you can do that by building a prototype and leveraging the cloud itself to test it against your target audiences and receive highly constructive feedback.
Security and compliance issues
Cloud platforms allow organizations to delegate security and regulatory compliance responsibilities to platform providers with a mutual agreement. Authoritative, certified updated versions also eliminate technical risks and the risk of data attacks by cybercriminals.
Compare and choose IoT cloud platforms
Currently, with the popularity of cloud platforms with renowned names like Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, Google cloud IoT platform, Salesforce and so on, the choice is not about which platform is the best but the most suitable one. Many companies want an IoT cloud platform that integrates all applications and is flexible in storing and transmitting data online. However, the specific needs of your business may be rather unique, and each platform has its own special features and benefits.
In terms of what you should achieve when adopting a cloud solution, some of the following criteria can help you make the optimal choice:
Connectivity and scalability
A cloud platform must first and foremost support the connection of multiple devices simultaneously and give you the ability to configure, allowing the devices to interact with each other. You could try to answer the questions about the considering platform if it was long and continuously there, any previous outage or who their customers were and how many devices they have connected.
Device management feature
Integrating your data on an IoT cloud platform, you will need to consider the manageability of the connected devices it provides you. This capability is demonstrated through the following features:
- Allows device organization to monitor device health and control detailed data in real time.
- Has a developer toolkit that enables you to manage and reset your IoT devices.
- Provides event logging and device control capabilities
Over-the-air firmware update capability
A good cloud platform will allow you to Update Firmware Over the Air (OTA) It will ensure that any new features or infrastructure, when added to the system, will not cause temporary disruption or, worse, be unrecoverable. Test them out by sending new features to wireless prototype devices, or have your support experts test them out at large scale.
Security
Check out the security and privacy features like hardware keys, two-factor authentication, data management segments that the platform provider gives you.
In addition, you should not underestimate the platform pricing model, depending on the time, your budget. You can also look at the free trials before definitely opting for it.
