With internet of things (IoT) adoption accelerating, IoT engineering is revolutionizing the world of modern business.
Today, nearly every facet of daily life generates information that can be used to benefit consumers, device-makers and companies utilizing connected devices to gain insight into the performance or efficiency of their operations. Whether it’s a wearable device that tracks our every step and monitors our heart rate, smartphones that know our hobbies, where we are at any given moment and generally keep us connected to the important things and people in our lives or other IoT devices that record and transfer data that allows companies to make more informed decisions, the ubiquity of IoT devices has contributed to the aggregation and analysis of enormous amounts of data.
As a leading IoT device design company, Cardinal Peak uniquely understands how IoT engineering can bring a significant amount of value to any organization. Let’s take a look at the benefits cloud computing provides the internet of things and the business value the IoT can bring to organizations across industries.
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The Cloud and IoT Design and Development
With the rise in cloud computing platforms, the cloud is what enables IoT devices and applications to communicate with one another. Providing an efficient, flexible and scalable platform for storing data and delivering the infrastructure and services needed to power IoT devices and applications, the cloud is what makes real-time operations and processing possible.
Since activities like storage and data processing take place in the cloud rather than on the device, the cloud is critical for aggregating data and gaining insights from that information. Consider a manufacturing company leveraging sensors to predict machine maintenance and analyze whether any components need to be replaced at different plants. Without the cloud, being able to simultaneously compare data across multiple locations is much more challenging.
Scalability
Additionally, cloud computing allows for superior scalability. When an organization utilizes a myriad of sensors, adding the amount of computational power each sensor would need to store and process the data they collect would be exorbitantly expensive and incredibly energy-intensive. By leveraging the cloud, IoT sensors collect data and send it to the cloud, where it will be stored and processed at scale.
Additional IoT Engineering Advantages the Cloud Provides
- Aggregation of significant amounts of data.
- Decreased costs for storage and computing.
- Scalability and system availability.
- Longer lifespan for battery-powered sensors/devices.
- Improved processing, commanding and analytics.
In short, the cloud is what makes smart devices, well, smart.
Engineering IoT: Opportunities for Businesses
Whatever industry an organization operates in, IoT devices empower decision-makers with the information they need to make more informed decisions. By recording and transferring data to monitor important processes, boost efficiencies and deliver new insights, IoT devices can identify patterns to inform organizations what is actually happening.
If you’re wondering how the IoT can benefit your organization, check out how the IoT is equipping companies to transform their strategies and operations.
Connectivity
In the IoT world, devices are connected to the cloud through many different methods: cellular, satellite, Wi-Fi, near-field communications (NFC), Zigbee, LoRa and ethernet. Connectivity is what allows organizations to transfer data between gadgets, applications and the cloud in an uninterrupted manner. IoT connectivity powers insights, fuels growth and improves the overall customer experience.
Transparency
Since almost every “thing” that is powered has the capacity to connect to information networks and communicate behaviors and habits, our collective lack of privacy is growing. But with that privacy deficiency comes increased access to information and transparency. Transparency ensures it’s easier to find out what’s really going on with an organization’s operations and processes.
Flexibility
Flexibility is crucial to the success of any enterprise’s deployment of IoT solutions. No two businesses are the same, and there is no one-size-fits-all IoT solution. To take advantage of the numerous benefits the IoT offers — whether tracking fleets, monitoring conditions or processes, reliably and securely connecting large numbers of mission-critical applications, or driving value with DevOps, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) — IoT solutions have to be flexible enough to adapt to an organization’s unique needs.
Efficiency
By connecting a business’s key processes, IoT devices can help decision-makers more easily identify ways to boost efficiency and productivity. Accurately monitoring machines or tracking processes empowers leaders to identify problematic bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions that increase the safety and efficiency of operations.
Automation
For the past several years, companies in different sectors have utilized IoT devices to digitally transform their businesses. Employing IoT sensors allows organizations to utilize the information these sensors collect to automate some business processes without the need for human interaction. Consequently, automation delivers several advantages by reducing the number of people involved in a process, including improved accuracy and uptime.
Collaboration
When the cloud and connected devices work together in a cohesive manner, unprecedented collaboration begins to occur. The real-time data and insights IoT devices deliver ensure business processes are automatically enhanced and those in charge can make faster decisions to move the organization forward.
Internet of Things Engineering: Business Challenges
Despite the numerous advantages the IoT offers, the influx of IoT devices makes managing and securing each of these devices and the data they generate more complicated than ever.
Security and Asset Management
As the number of IoT devices in the world is expected to reach 55.7 billion in the next few years, companies face increasing complexity and challenges in discovering, managing and securing all of these assets. Plus, as security and privacy requirements change, these challenges are further complicated.
As organizations rush to deploy IoT solutions, implementing the right security measures is often overlooked. From weak passwords and lacking patches and updates to insecure interfaces, insufficient data protection, “bring your own device” (BYOD) and substandard device management, there are often security vulnerabilities in new IoT infrastructure and gaps in protecting the legacy systems to which these devices connect.
While conducting an accurate inventory of traditional devices and cloud assets is difficult enough, understanding which devices organizations are responsible for securing and managing becomes nearly impossible when deploying a wide array of IoT devices with varying purposes.
Maximizing the Value of Your IoT Design and Development
Even though these benefits are just some of the ways implementing IoT technology can deliver business value, the immense potential value IoT solutions deliver is clear. Since the internet of things spans a broad range of products, environments, operations and processes, organizations can undeniably leverage IoT solutions to unlock previously unexploited revenue streams, create new processes, produce higher-quality products and services, and gain new competitive advantages.
If you’re looking for an IoT engineering firm to help your organization realize the tremendous business value the internet of things can deliver, give us a shout!
- To understand how IoT and connected devices are transforming industries, check out our blog post The Rise of Connected Device Engineering: Transforming Industries Through IoT Integration.
- Uncover how Industry 4.0 technologies and IoT are reshaping entire industries in our blog post Industry 4.0 Technologies: How Connected Device Engineering Transforms Manufacturing and Supply Chains.