From smart Fitbits to Amazon Echo or Google Home, most people today use connected smart devices and wearables to monitor their health, such as heart rate, calories, and daily activity. In fact, some people use them to manage their heating, lighting, home security, and to reorder essential household items when supplies run low.
The ubiquitous digital transformation, whether in homes, businesses, hospitals, buildings, or entire towns, demonstrates that the Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at an astonishing pace.
According to Juniper Research, the number of IoT devices will increase from 35 billion connections in 2020 to 83 billion in 2024, representing a growth of approximately 130% over the next four years as enterprise IoT users expand their IoT ecosystems to improve operational efficiency and generate real-time insights.
Building a competitive advantage with the cloud
The pandemic strikes proved that every sector must digitize. Companies must double down on digital transformation projects, and technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) are the only way to achieve this. Adopting these technologies is the only way to improve customer service, automate processes and tasks, track assets, detect existing vulnerabilities, and reinvent and update existing business models. But the success of IoT is inseparable from cloud computing. We can simply say that the cloud provides more than just the connectivity that IoT devices rely on. This means that IoT devices depend on the cloud to store basic data in a central location that can be easily accessed, managed, and distributed in real time.
When it comes to the relationship between the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, here are four significant benefits that can compel organizations to use the cloud to unlock the full potential of their IoT devices.
Cloud deployment and scalability
The cloud can help organizations overcome the technical and cost barriers they face in deploying IoT solutions.
The cloud eliminates the need to set up physical servers, deploy databases, configure networks, manage connectivity, or perform other infrastructure tasks. It makes launching virtual servers, starting databases, and building the data pipelines needed to run IoT solutions quick and easy.
On the other hand, local IoT network infrastructure requires a lot of hardware and time-consuming configuration work to ensure that everything is working properly; implementing a cloud-based IoT system is significantly more streamlined.
For example, increasing the number of IoT-enabled devices only requires renting another virtual server or more cloud space.
Similarly, cloud services can easily simplify remote device lifecycle management, ensuring a 360-degree view of device infrastructure and tools, thereby automatically updating and setting software and firmware wirelessly.
Communication and Data Management
IoT devices are crucial to both consumers and businesses because of their information. But they become even more helpful when they interact with each other.
For example, a connected thermostat can communicate with a smart refrigerator to raise or lower the temperature. A connected microcontroller can analyze and predict preventative maintenance, which is essential to reduce the chance of any damage.
The cloud helps achieve this by simplifying and optimizing machine-to-machine communication and facilitating cross-interface communication. With the increasing interaction between numerous connected devices and the resulting massive amounts of data, organizations must find a cost-effective way to store, process, and access the data in their IoT solutions.
In addition, they need to be able to scale to manage peak demand or expand their infrastructure to handle additional functions as they add more features to their IoT solutions.
We all know that IoT solutions generate massive amounts of data. In this context, adding built-in management tools and processing capabilities to support the efficient and successful transfer of data between devices simplifies the process. The cloud also provides a managed platform for big data and data analytics at significantly reduced costs.
Data mobility and interoperability
Data generated by IoT devices can be stored and processed on cloud servers and easily accessed anytime, anywhere without any infrastructure or network issues. Similarly, data can be collected remotely in real time from devices located anywhere and in any time zone.
Sometimes, interoperability can hinder a company's ability to link or integrate data generated by IoT devices into other data resources.
Adding cloud access can help link applications and seamlessly integrate all data sources for analysis, regardless of their origin.
The cloud can also help organizations simplify the integration of IoT solutions with other smart products developed by third parties, creating added value for users.
Security Question
Security has always been a major concern due to the emergence of security vulnerabilities, and the failure to update IoT devices has created a channel for cybercriminals. Cloud platforms can support enterprises in improving and strengthening security in two ways.
First, as we already know, cloud providers can make it easy to perform regular software and firmware updates and use digital certificate signing to ensure that these updates are secure and authorized for users.
Secondly, cloud platforms help enable customized client-side and server-side encryption to ensure the complete security of data flowing through the IoT ecosystem, even when it is at rest in the database. Many cloud service providers offer 24/7 monitoring to minimize the risk of security breaches.
Cloud-enabled IoT is an effective and scalable solution.
Many organizations are adopting IoT technology, while those that still rely on traditional infrastructure are finding themselves overwhelmed.
By leveraging cloud computing, IoT device communication, and memory in power plants, organizations will experience better connectivity and a higher return on investment.
Adopting a hybrid cloud approach helps IT teams build the right portfolio of managed opportunities, enabling them to manage rapid deployment and activation while maximizing the use of IoT devices and ensuring a better IoT strategy without investing significant time, money, and effort in developing costly product infrastructure.
For organizations deciding to expand their IoT ambitions, the cloud can help develop IoT products faster, easily manage and process all generated data, protect the IoT ecosystem, and establish better integration with existing systems and other IoT devices. This means that cloud computing will become key to accelerating time-to-market, offering greater flexibility, and adding lifecycle value to the success and profitability of IoT deployments.
