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Quick Tips:
7 Things to Know About Cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) Fitness wristbands. Smart thermostats. Beer kegs that tell you how much lager is left. These are just a few examples from the Internet of Things (IoT): the vast, rapidly expanding universe of smart, connected devices—some old and familiar, some brand new—that are transforming a wide range of business processes. While much of the early interest in IoT was focused on the “things,” now attention is turning to the cloud processing power needed to realize the IoT vision. Take advantage of these Quick Tips for a snapshot of some of the latest thinking on cloud and IoT.
1 IoT Off the Drawing Boards
IoT is out of the visionary stage. Given the wide availability of smarter, smaller processors; low-cost sensors; and any number of networking options, it’s fairly easy to get an IoT application up and running. According to IDC, the number of connected devices will more than triple by 2020, hitting 30 billion. Smart building applications are leading the way, with healthcare, public services, transportation systems, the energy grid, retail/hospitality and many other markets seeing steady growth.1 Data traffic generated by IoT devices will amount to 507.5 zettabytes per year by 2019, according to Cisco.2
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Impact on Business Processes Consumer-oriented IoT devices have captured the public’s attention, but the real story of IoT is its impact on business processes: optimizing factory production lines and supply chains, beaming targeted advertising to on-the-go consumers, providing situational awareness to first responders in natural disasters, reducing energy consumption, helping doctors make life and death decisions and much more. Cisco estimates that taking advantage of these capabilities, among many others, will create $14.4 trillion in net profit between 2013 and 2022. Given that this means a roughly 21 percent impact on corporate bottom lines, there is little wonder why enterprises are getting serious about IoT.3
3 Cloud is the “Glue” for IoT
IoT and cloud are a natural fit. Cloud services are ‘always on’ and provide the global accessibility IoT solutions require. As IoT data traffic expands into the zettabyte stratosphere, cloud services can scale and take over functions—processing, storage, etc.—that can’t be easily handled locally. Cloud supports the horizontal data and control flows (e.g., coordination policies) needed to make IoT applications perform effectively. In effect, cloud is the glue that binds the world of IoT together and is crucial to enabling the pervasive computing and ‘big data’ supported personalization and customization that are the real promises of IoT. As a result, it’s projected that in the next five years, more than 90% of all IoT data will be hosted on cloud service provider platforms.4
https://www.vmware.com/ciovantage/article/catch-the-iot-wave http://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-traffic-to-surge-courtesy-of-iot-says-cisco/ 3 http://mercatus.org/publication/projecting-growth-and-economic-impact-internet-things 4 http://www.machinetomachinemagazine.com/2014/12/04/idc-report-worldwide-iot-predictions-for-2015/ 1 2
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4 Cloud Addresses IoT Implementation Challenges
While cloud services are critical to the long-term vision of IoT, they also address two key IoT implementation issues: Legacy IoT Solutions: Even though the concept of IoT is relatively new, many IoT technologies, such as sensors and machine-to-machine communications, have been around for years and are already at work in legacy implementations. Cloud-based solutions make it possible to leverage these legacy infrastructures and integrate them into a more holistic, IoT-oriented workflows and analytics. Enterprise Integration: Cloud can also facilitate integration with back-end infrastructures that weren’t designed to scale or were not designed to support seamlessly adding and removing devices in real time. Cloud-based IoT is designed to flex to meet demands and to support connections to a wide range of both existing and anticipated applications.
5 IoT and Security
Security is a major concern in the evolving IoT world. An IEEE paper identified 20 different IoT security issues, ranging from access control and identity management to protecting sensitive data and preventing denial of service attacks.5 These familiar issues take on a new dimension in IoT largely because of its vast scale but also because a key benefit of IoT is derived from sharing data horizontally (e.g., enabling different healthcare providers to have access to separate parts of a patient’s private medical records or enabling the real-time analysis of consumer behavior across different devices and applications). As IEEE notes, this kind of lateral sharing historically is not the norm for enterprise applications, or even for the first round of IoT systems. It has also not been a component of most cloud service providers strategies— instead, the emphasis has traditionally been on strong isolation between applications. In IoT, security is going to be far more contextual and customers will put a premium on cloud providers with the resources and expertise to adapt to this new world.
6 Hybrid Clouds in IoT
In the meantime, these kinds of security challenges will likely motivate the deployment of hybrid clouds in which tenants will continue to manage sensitive, private information on systems under their control, while employing a cloud approach for the rest. The selection of a cloud provider for this approach requires examining their ability to support the more nuanced sharing demanded in many IoT scenarios.
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Matching the Cloud Provider to the IoT Application Choosing the right cloud provider is highly dependent on the kinds of IoT solutions that require support. Some IoT use cases involve devices that continually send and receive data. Others leverage devices that need just an occasional connection and transfer relatively small amounts of data. These variables will have a significant impact on the capacity required and on how the provider’s pricing is structured. Other key factors in choosing a cloud provider for IoT center on reliability, hosting requirements and applications expertise. When NaviSite won a major contract to provide cloud hosting for a smart transportation network in the United Kingdom, for example, the hosting facility had to be located in the UK, capable of enabling remote connections for developers working abroad and also provide applications expertise for Oracle database and Microsoft Windows access points.6 5
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http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7165580&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls %2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D7165580 http://www.navisite.com/resource-center/case-study/hybrid-cloud-enables-costain-seize-new-business-opportunities
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