BCG’s latest IoT market research finds that predictive maintenance, automated inventory and self-optimizing production are some of the top use cases driving the need to build internet of things (IoT) platforms by 2020.
As we think of building IoT solutions, it’s important to have a deep understanding of the business-level considerations and architectural design-level considerations before selecting the right IoT platform. This article talks about some of the important factors to consider in selecting an IoT platform.
Considerations for Selecting the Right IoT Platform
Following are some of the considerations in selecting a right IoT platform or IoT solution provider.
Business Need and Requirements: Identify the business needs, estimate the ROI, identify what specific business and architectural use cases needs to be addressed.
Examine the core differences in different IoT solution providers and analyze their evaluate out-of-the-box features against the defined business/technical limitations for the use cases you have identified before deciding to build custom or off-the shelf solution.
Global Presence and Business Stability: Identify whether the existing IoT solution providers have a global footprint with datacenters across the geos, which will enable you to scale in that business region as your business grows.
Device Management: Check if the platform and the hardware is supported by the IoT provider and supports remote monitoring of the devices and maintain over-the-air updates to the devices.
Data Analytics: Look for options on how data will be stored, the data storage options to store large volumes of data, with segregation and storage of device and telemetry data, in addition to the extraction and reporting tools and dashboards.
IoT Data Collection: Identify how data can be collected from the devices and how your devices can communicate to the respective platform (cloud or local). Each vendor has different means of collecting the data from the remote devices, For example, Azure IoT uses Azure IoT Hub while AWS uses Rules Engin, to connect and communicate to the devices and collect the data.
Edge Computing: Identify the network latency, how to filter the data selectively from different devices and relay it to the cloud, the connectivity of devices that are not exposed to internet through a field gateway, the customization of the gateway and protocols and how to achieve quicker response times with different IoT platforms.
IoT Protocols and Standards: Examine whether the device list supported by the vendor is developed as per the standards defined by IoT consortiums and whether the vendor supports standard protocols or uses any proprietary technologies.
Compatibility and Extensibility: Examine for the compatibility of the devices to the vendor platforms, support for additional new devices to the platform and support for customization/extensibility of WRT gateway protocols and device rules.
Storage: Identify platforms/IoT vendors that provide big data storage, data security, compliance and data recovery options.
Security: Think security at all levels from ground up—device-level security, device-to-cloud security, cloud security, data security and privacy, user-level security, application security and end-to-end security.
Pricing and Hosting Models: Finally, compare hosting models and pricing models offered and any hidden costs. Pricing varies from per device to per million message-basis, per message volumes/day, cloud usage and other factors.
IoT Architectural Considerations
Hardware and Software Heterogeneity: The platform should support for various hardware and software devices from a wide range of device manufacturers, multiple devices, device operating systems and support multiple protocols including MQTT, web sockets and AMQP. It also should support device management and monitoring of connected/non-connected devices and seamlessly connect with multiple network providers.
Enhance Security: The system should have security and privacy for device, users, device and user identity, authentication and authorization with policies, data protection (encryption/decryption) for data at rest and in motion, data attestation, SAS-based token per unique publisher, certificates, TLS authentication support and adhering security standards to enable developers to follow security standards during device development and security testing.
Hot/Cold Data Path Analysis: Determine the network latency, support for high-scale data ingestion, support for high-scale data processing and high data retention options, support for segregating device metadata from telemetry data storage and the ability to perform analytics on the data with customizable dashboards.
Scale Efficiently: The system should support for hyperscale deployments of individual data processing units such as event hubs, stream analytics and AWS Kinesis and also support millions of device and scale between small to hyperscaled dimensions of devices and telemetry.
Flexibility: The platform should be extensible to use third-party solutions for individual conceptual components in IoT solutions and should support integration with business applications/workflows and REST APIs/CLIs for communicating to the systems from external systems.
DevOps Automation: There should be support for the adoption of build, test and deployment automation for device and other solution components in an IoT solution with the right set of tools for DevOps. Testing and monitoring are key in DevOps automation with user-centric end-to-testing and automated releases of firmware updates to the remote devices. The platform you choose or building should be driven with DevOps capability.
QoS, Cost: Other key factors to consider include maintaining data and devices, monitoring devices, scalability, reliability of systems, backup and disaster recovery of data and devices, performance of the devices, the network and pricing models (based on messages sent/received, per devices, cloud transactions, message size, throttling limitations of cloud based components, cost of ingress/egress/compute/storage/services/business apps/devices/security, etc.).
Lower Barrier to Entry: The platform should support the ability to evaluate, prototype, deploy and scale quickly; lower the barriers to trying IoT out-of-the-box/preconfigured solutions; and support new development and experimentation with the data to refine and derive useful business metrics from telemetry.
Building an IoT platform may be challenging, but making critical decisions on business factors and design considerations such as device management, security, storage, analytics and pricing before selecting a platform can help achieve ROI and lead to building a mature IoT platform.
About the Author / Lavanya Subbarayalu
Lavanya Subbarayalu is Senior Architect working with Technology Office in HCL Technologies. She has expertise in IOT, Azure, DevOps consulting & Microsoft technologies. She is associated with DevOps COE, working on design and Development of DevOps solutions and consulting tools. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
