THE CLOUDS ROLE IN BETTERING THE INTERNET OF THINGS

The Cloud's Role in Bettering the Internet of Things

Thanks to developments in mobile communications, today more than 2.6 billion people have access to internet services. This number is set to increase exponentially in the coming years.The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be the future of our connected world. IoT refers to the concept in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data. IoT is more prominent in the industrial sector where advanced machinery and robots are already being connected to the internet and are monitored and operated remotely. This trend is expected to continue and become the new standard.

All these devices are set to produce massive amounts of data which needs to be stored and processed by the manufacturers who produce them. For example, if a company makes a thermostat, this device will need to send performance data such as internal logs and power consumption to allow the manufacturer to study failure patterns. Also, by having the device directly connected to the internet, the manufacturer can easily push updates to the device without intervention of the user. This indicates that all the companies, regardless of what their industry might be, will need to maintain a cluster of servers to support the continuous flow of data to and from their devices. This will further require companies to maintain IT staff, required hardware, and software to be able to maintain the devices, which could be a challenge for small to medium sized businesses. This is where the cloud comes into play.

The Power of Cloud:

The IoT translates into numerous connected devices,which means gigabytes of data that will need to be stored and a number of servers to process that data. This is not possible in the conventional style, as maintaining a local infrastructure of that magnitude would be very expensive. Cloud computing eliminates this need by providing organizations with required computing resources. Furthermore, it allows devices to be pegged to cloud services, enabling remote control of the stored data and the ability to remotely analyze data to extract the required information. With the cloud, these capabilities are possible without purchasing additional hardware. As a result, an organization can stay true to their core competency without worrying about the IT maintenance aspect.

Cloud promises to power the future of IoT; however, the integration solutions for maintaining IoT support for cloud are in early stages and the software development required for the integration of these two technologies is mostly proprietary. This means that if IoT device manufacturers are looking for a cloud solution, they will have to develop their own technology or rely on a third party. Other software manufacturers and the open source community is rapidly catching up, but there is still some time to attain a fully reliable system. I fan organization decides to go with a third party solution, the services provided can vary depending upon the party selected. This third party space is already being occupied by major players like IBM, Google and Microsoft with their proprietary APIs and cloud-based software.

Before choosing a third party to provide software for the IoT technology, an organization should evaluate what the future holds for them. If they are planning to upgrade their devices or manufacture other models, they need to ensure that the third party solution will accommodate these changes. Features such as security, web applications and remote firmware upgrades should be available. As the technology will be proprietary, it might be difficult to customize it to the exact needs of each and every device. Companies should ensure that these factors will not significantly affect their services. 

How the Cloud will help

When it comes to IoT,computing will provide the virtual software and hardware resources to analyze and process the huge amounts of data collected. The analytic and big data software tools that are provided on the cloud will help process this data and convert it into meaningful information such as patterns and trends. This information can help in predicting future patterns and market conditions and there by provide company direction from a technological point of view.

Intelligent and cognitive software tools are being developed to analyze the huge amount of data obtained from using Internet of Things. These software tools continuously learn by studying the data patterns and improve overtime to accommodate and address specific forms of data that they frequently receive. Such cognitive software systems are expected to be commercially available on the cloud soon. Some open source tools like Apache Hadoop already exist and can help in processing such large volumes of data.

With the Internet of Things, the future of the internet promises to be a much larger network that connects various day to day devices. Cloud computing powering these services will lead to a new technological revolution that will utilize best from both.