Overview of IoT Platform Benefits and Use Cases

What is the IoT Platform?

Internet of Things (IoT) is connected using the Internet capable of sending the data to the Cloud. The staff in Internet of Things equipped with different sensors, which have their role in interacting with the physical object and collecting information from that internet of things IoT Platform.

How IoT Platform Works?

The things in IoT are equipped with different sensors that interact with the physical object and collect information. A single device may have fitted with multiple sensors. IoT devices are configured to push the sensor data to the Cloud where anybody can perform the required transformation and analytics.

Smart Farming gives better control to the farmers for their livestock, growing crops, cutting costs, and resources. Source- IoT based Smart Farming

What are the Benefits of IoT Platform?

Listed below are the 5 main benefits of IoT Platform:

1. IoT devices use to implement the Smart Home.
2. IoT devices help in monitoring things in the industrial sector.
3. It helps to collect data from different devices and generating alerts in case of any threshold.
4. Intelligence Industries.
5. In healthcare, IoT can monitor patients remotely and do the needful treatment from the remote location.

Why Adopting the IoT Matters?

The growth in the use of IoT devices is changing the lifestyle, personal health, habits, environment, and industries across different sectors. IoT enables the capture of physical data and applying separate analytics based on the collected data. IoT has made life very easy in various fields such as Healthcare, Industrial Sector, Home Automation, Environmental Monitoring, and Retail.

How to adopt the Internet of Things Platform?

IoT plays a different role in each sector; the only common thing is connecting physical devices to the Cloud.

1. Healthcare System - In Healthcare, IoT can monitor a patient's heart rate or blood pressure. It can generate an alert to notify the doctor to guide to take immediate decisions. It can also help in Assets Management and configuring or tuning any device from a remote location in hospitals.
2. Industrial - Industrial IoT helps to monitor the assets in the industrial sector. It can help in implementing Predictive Maintenance to minimize the loss in case of any failure. IoT could help to trigger the alert if any of the machine parts serviced in Real-Time can be replaced and prevent the massive loss.
3. Home Automation - There are lots of IoT devices available which used in Home Automation/Security. IoT is beneficial for smart monitoring of home appliances, including door sensors, cameras, smoke or fire detector, and smart electric devices.
4. Environmental Monitoring - When it comes to monitoring the environment, IoT devices can collect the data in Real-Time from the sensors. That data helps in forecasting.
5. Retail - In the Retail sector, IoT can help the retailers to upgrade for providing a better experience with the customers, also helps in theft prevention and analytics based on sales.

Smart Meters enable the intelligent and efficient use of energy at homes and businesses. Source: IoT based Smart Meters

Best Practices for Implementing IoT Cloud Platform

The most important thing while deploying an IoT solution is to take care of the security. When everything is on the internet, there may be a possibility of a breach into the system, which can help hackers misuse the devices.

1. Network Security - First of all, the person/organization implementing IoT needs to secure their network, which has a connection with the IoT devices. Take an example of home automation: when someone has to implement home automation, he should keep the network secret. He must use a proper encryption technic if using a Wi-Fi network and use appropriate authentication and access control to access the network.
2. Device Security - Other than the network, device-level security is needed, preventing unauthorized access of the devices. Select the device manufacturer wisely, which provides security patches after an interval.
3. Data Security - After the network and device, everyone must secure the database or data warehouse where they store their data collected from IoT devices.

What are the best IoT Cloud platforms and Tools?

Ingestion Tools

1. Apache MiNiFi - Apache MiNiFi is the sub-project of Apache NiFi, which can collecting IoT devices. Apache MiNiFi is of very size and capability to run on small devices, which consumes meager resources.
2. StreamSets Data Collector Edge - SDC edge is a very lightweight agent capable of collecting the data from its source of creation.

IoT Cloud Platform Solutions

AWS IoT Core

AWS IoT Core is a managed Cloud platform by AWS, enabling the secure connection between different connected devices(sensors) and multiple Cloud services. It enables to handle billions of devices and trillion of messages. It also helps to route those messages to different AWS Cloud services and allows the building of analytics and machine learning models.

Google Cloud IoT Core

Cloud IoT Core is the managed service of Google, which allows users to quickly and securely connect, control, and ingest data from millions of IoT devices. It also enables us to communicate with other Google Cloud services for collecting, processing, analyzing, and visualizing the data. Google Cloud IoT Core is a serverless service that automatically scales in response to Real-Time events. It supports both HTTP and MQTT protocols of communication with IoT devices.

Azure IoT Hub

In Azure, IoT Hub acts as the central unit which allows connecting, monitor and manages millions of devices using bi-directional messaging. It supports AMQP, MQTT, HTTP protocols for communication with IoT devices. It also helps their own protocol gateway Azure IoT Protocol Gateway, in case a device doesn’t support AMQP, MQTT, HTTP.

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Conclusion

Internet of things is a trending keyword in the field of technology. The Internet of Things is actually a pretty simple concept, and it means taking all the things in the world and connecting them to the internet. Hence, in the fast-moving pace of digitization, enterprises are investing a lot of time and effort to dive into this wave ranging from industry to industry. For industry-specific case studies and use cases of IoT, read our use case based on IoT Solutions for Smart Manufacturing.

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