IoT Platform Requirements To LIVE Your IoT Product

Each company’s journey of bringing an IoT-connected product to market always has to ask this question to live their products.

1. IoT PLATFORM

An IoT platform should be highly available with minimal downtime so that your customers can always access your product. It should be scalable and allow you to add more devices or more payloads from existing devices that automatically scale with every device and/or payload.

As you can imagine IoT services building a highly scalable and available platform is a difficult task that requires a lot of time and resources. The value an IoT platform gives you is high availability and scalability from day one without hiring additional resources, such as dev op engineers or allocating time at the start of your project building a platform before you can start developing your product.

2. CONNECT DATA TO THE CLOUD

An important part of any IoT platform is easily and securely getting data to the cloud. This data can come from many different places, such as sensors, devices, or 3rd party databases/services.

Rather than focusing on getting this data to the cloud, you want to spend most of your time building the branded user interface and analytics part of your product, where your customers will get the most value. An IoT platform should simplify bringing data insecurely by having authentication methods already built-in. This allows for less of a need for SDKs or lower-level code to get the data out of the device to the cloud and provides an easy way to update the sensor or device on the fly as needed.

3. TRANSFORM DATA, APPLY BUSINESS LOGIC, AND TRACK KPIs

An IoT platform should enable you to easily parse and transform the data that you collect, apply business logic, and track KPIs. It also should gain insights from data and allow you to create alerts for appropriate team members or 3rd party services like ServiceNow or Salesforce cases when issues arise. This allows you to immediately address new issues and track those issues over time to know which issues are systematic.

4. END-TO-END APPLICATION

An IoT platform should provide built-in authentication methods so you can easily create hierarchies of customers and multi-tenant applications. This enables you to create many different groups so that each customer can easily log into the experience and only see the data you gave them access to. This division of different customers and various roles within a customer framework to only see the data they have access to can be very difficult to initially set up if the IoT platform does not provide this functionality out of the box.

Look for an IoT services platform that can give you that multi-tenancy throughout the entire end-to-end application all the way from the edge through the business logic to that end-user experience. The value of multi-tenancy saves you time and reduces errors in your application as you continue to add new features, make improvements, onboard more customers, and fix bugs.

5. FULL CONTROL OVER YOUR IoT CONNECTED PRODUCT

It’s important for an IoT platform to allow you to create an IoT product without compromise. When looking for an IoT platform, be sure to choose one that will enable you to quickly build any type of workflow that is needed to transform data and gather insights from your data, connect to any type of device over any connectivity layer, and the ability to build the exact vision for the end-user experience that your customers will interact with each day.