An IoT platform passages the opening between device sensors and data networks. The platform offers critical insights into data that is used in backend applications. An IoT platforms is a set of constituents that helps developers blow out the applications, remotely gather data, protect connectivity, and implement sensor management. An IoT platform helps manage connectivity of devices and also enables developers to create new mobile software applications. It enables the collection of data from devices and allows business transformation. An IoT platform connects various components, guaranteeing a constant flow of communication between devices. The goal of an IoT platform is to offer all the common functionalities for the application so that developers can focus on building features that distinguish their product and add value for their customers.
Top 5 Factors to Consider While Choosing an IoT Platforms
Scalability
The complexity of managing data upsurges as the number of linked devices grows, which, in turn, makes scalability a key factor when selecting an IoT platform vendor. With an augmented number of connected devices, expenses and risks related to the data and hardware also increases. Businesses may not connect a million devices from the very start, but it is vital to make sure that the IoT platform can tackle augmented data load as they connect more devices. This is the reason why they should go for a provider that offers a platform that is created to deliver scalability and best performance for devices. The correct IoT platform will support millions of devices with dissimilar technological necessities, providing constant insights from the collected data without bargaining on efficiency.
Intelligent edge devices
This can be one of the most ignored topics when it comes to assessing the contributions of an IoT platform. An ideal IoT platforms should offer edge intelligence competencies to outspread the power of the cloud to mobile and IoT devices. Such competencies will enable an intelligent edge that can bring computing power, data, applications, and intelligence to all places where the data already exists. This will allow the edge devices to make decisions based on the local data that they produce, in addition to leveraging the aids of the cloud to arrange and manage those devices.
Cloud infrastructure
No matter what IoT platform software provider has been chosen by a business, the basic requirement of that platform is to integrate easily with the existing IT system, which is hosted on-premises. In such a situation, the hybrid cloud approach can prove to help in a lot of ways as equal to the singular method. The hybrid cloud syndicates the best of both worlds, offering the convenience of private cloud and scaling competencies of public cloud. When a business accepts this approach, the requests are not pressed through the public internet, thus dropping the latency and access time. Furthermore, users can also leverage the computing competencies of public cloud when the tasks surpass the workload of the private cloud constituent. Using hybrid cloud, all the business-critical info can be reserved on-premises, while less critical info can be stored in the public cloud.
Disaster recovery
Data security is a big concern for the present data-driven marketplace. An IoT platform software provider should be well-prepared for an IT infrastructure downtime, whether it is due to natural circumstances or cyberattacks. As the safety of the data depends on the platform provider, the vendor should authenticate a list of things prior to handing over business-sensitive data. Businesses should check if their preferred vendor has the right disaster recovery strategy in place, ask whether they are using a dedicated infrastructure to manage the data, and how frequently the platform takes data backup. Furthermore, businesses should verify if the vendor can provide failover clusters to take over the job in case of any stoppage, thus assuring higher availability.
Communication protocols and standards
Any best IoT platforms chosen by a business needs to confirm that the platform directly or indirectly offers protocol translation. Most enterprise IoT platforms have started backing up CoAP and AMQP, in addition to supporting the most common ones such as HTTP and MQTT. Businesses should confirm if their IoT platforms software provider can support upgraded versions of these protocols or newer protocols with ease. They can also ask their IoT platforms provider if there is a scope to execute a custom protocol and if they can handle it from the backend.
