Why the Cloud is Essential for the Success of IoT?

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been announced for a decade already. The concept covers both the creation of a link between the digital world and the physical world of connected objects and sensors, but also the development of infrastructure to handle the data generated from these objects, such as data processing, analysis storage, and how to develop insights from the data to deliver knowledge.

Gartner estimates that by 2020, the number of connected objects will reach 26 billion, and the related goods and services will generate an income of $300 billion. The development and operation of the Internet of Things will transform the new digital revolution to the Cloud market.

New requirements for skills and infrastructure

The potential of IoT applications and services are endless; from autonomous vehicles to smart home, smart city, healthcare, entertainment, education and much more economic sectors you can think of.  To operate all these innovative facilities, the data they generated need to be processed and analyzed. The connected device manufacturers and the IoT service providers will be responsible for the management of these applications and therefore have to provide skills and appropriate infrastructure. Those requirements are new to many manufacturers. For example, it is unlikely that a traditional refrigerator manufacturer has infrastructure and skills capable of managing Big Data generated from the new smart refrigerator.

The flexibility of Cloud service for connected objects

In most cases, the choice of cloud infrastructure will be the preferred method.

For the level of demand in the IoT world, only a Cloud solution can offer adequate flexibility and adapt in real-time data management requirements. For the example of the smart refrigerator, the high demand periods might be before 9:30 am and after 6:00pm. As such, economically and technically, it would be rational to reduce the software infrastructures capacity outside these peak periods, especially when it is possible to automatically adapt on-demand capacity in real-time via an API to generate the provisions on the virtual machines.

The Cloud solution is crucial for business success in the IoT world because it is able to quickly adapt its infrastructure to cope with demand. It also offers the infrastructure needs that most moderate sized companies are seeking to hold their investments in technical infrastructure.

The arrival of IoT has raised the security concerns for the data collected, especially those stored via medical connected objects. The Cloud solution efforts in this area are strong responses to this concern – Cloud solution offers high level of IT security that usually most IoT manufacturers and application vendors cannot provide or cannot afford to invest. A Cloud solution can ensure the physical security of data without additional investment.

The Cloud of Things

The interdependence of the Internet of Things and Cloud leads some experts to talk about “Cloud of Things”, a formula that expresses the need for cloud infrastructures to manage exchanges between objects and data processing. Cloud is an excellent solution to manage the IoT data because flows related to the use of objects and data analysis are highly variable, it requires the dependent infrastructure has strong elasticity. The infrastructure capacity in a Cloud solution can be increased regularly based on demands. The Internet of Things will therefore only be able to grow with the Cloud solution.