5 Tips for Choosing a Cloud IoT platform

Do you know that your cloud IoT platform must monitor IoT endpoints and event streams and analyze data in the cloud? It also enables application development and deployment. Undeniably, IoT is used to improve services and products in various industries. According to a Valuates report, the market size of IoT cloud platform is expected to reach 10330 USD million by 2028, and at a CAGR of 18.2% during 2022-28. In addition, IoT analytics forecasted that by 2025 there will be over 27 billion IoT connections. It’s safe to say that the market of IoT is thriving and experiencing tremendous growth.

Now, the question is how to choose a cloud IoT service platform to make the most of it? Choosing an ideal one for your business for cloud development services is vital because it provides reliable installations, and excellent customer services that are responsive to your business needs.

What is a Cloud IoT Platform?

Several technologies fit within the definition of an IoT platform. Primarily, it refers to hardware, software, web services and gateway devices. However, an IoT cloud platform refers to the cloud components of a system, which interact with, manage, update and perform other maintenance and administrative operations on IoT devices.

Speaking of the IoT cloud’s features, it embraces flexibility, a scalable model for delivering infrastructure, and services, which need to power IoT devices and applications with limited resources.

In addition, the IoT cloud offers an on-demand, affordable hyper-scale so that companies can benefit from. It also embraces a few of important features such as underlying infrastructure, servers and storage, which are required for real-time operations and processing.

If we’re talking about IoT cloud platforms, they are generally known for bringing IoT devices and cloud computing capabilities delivered as an end-to-end service. Hence, it is also referred to as the Cloud Service IoT platform.

Here’re some essential features that a cloud IoT platform offers:

Connectivity & network management
Device acquisition
Device management
Application enablement
Integration & storage
Processing analysis & visualization

Check out some popular IoT cloud platforms:

Here’s 5 Essential Tips to Choose an IoT Platform

There are different types of IoT platforms: edge-to-cloud platform, IoT connectivity, cloud management, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. If you are already familiar with IoT, you’ve probably known that there is no simple answer to choose the ideal cloud IoT platform for your business. Mostly, it majorly depends on various factors such as business model, resources, and the type of device.

So, when choosing the best IoT cloud platform for your project, you should ask some questions regarding the project’s requirements and directions. Ask yourself the following questions about the needs of the project:

Requirements: What’re the requirements we have for cloud platform communication? Are there hardware limitations, usage requirements, or any specific protocols?
Security: How to secure devices? What will be the potential security risks?
Management & Troubleshooting: How do we manage and troubleshoot our apps? What about remote device administrators, on-site maintenance technicians, and the tools to maintain the devices?

Now, here’s some tips for choosing a cloud IoT platform for your organization:

1. Choose a Future-Proof IoT platform

IoT is considered the new market, constantly evolving and improving the way technologies solve problems. First, you need to choose an IoT platform that should be able to grow with the market. Plus, it needs to be effective even though new standards and protocols have been introduced. Therefore, no matter if such shifts are based on the system, network, cloud environment, security stack, chip/module, or end-point apps.

2. Know the importance of time-to-value

You only need to pick a vendor who can digitize in a few days or weeks to get the most out of cloud IoT platforms. Vendors can offer services at a higher speed by putting in minimal effort.

In short, you need to choose the platform that can give results in days or weeks and not in the months and years.

Pro Tip: Do not choose only one platform for proof of concept (PoC). It’s better to pick an end-to-end platform, which takes users from PoC to deployment.

3. Make sure IoT data must be application agnostic

The term “hardware agnosticism” means keeping the software independent of any hardware or specific platform. The hardware-agnostic system components do not require any particular hardware adaptations. Without suffering compatibility issues, you can work with a diverse range of systems.

IoT is all about unfastening latent data to enable users to make better decisions. This way, it’s possible to get better products. It is assumed that there will be millions of dollars of assets, which can be digitized in the future.

Therefore, an ideal IoT platform must be able to move data quickly to the apps, which are best suited for consuming and producing value from the data regardless of the primary resources.

4. Choosing a platform should be reusable over other products

If your company does not have multiple ERP systems, then there are chances not to have scalable and efficient investments in technology. Choose an IoT platform that can scale your entire business.

Suppose, if you run a big-sized business, it is better to use a single platform. It helps to manage any product or asset, e.g. trucks, pallets or any factory equipment.

For example, Carto, a Software-as-a-Service cloud computing platform, provides web mapping, GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping, and spatial data science tools. In addition, its location intelligence platform helps companies with useful features, such as location data. It helps to make decisions based on conditions such as public transportation and storm damage.

Furthermore, the platform has to seamlessly integrate IoT data into existing or new applications.

5. Don’t rely on one compute scenario

One of the essential points to keep in mind is not to depend only on one scenario. Meanwhile, there are mainly three types of compute scenarios:

1). IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service),

2). PaaS (Platform as a Service), and

3). SaaS (Software as a Service).

The cloud is a powerful force; however, it cannot solve all the requirements one company has. Organizations also look for performance and cost considerations. In other scenarios, the user has to run the workload in a specific cloud infrastructure.

In order to reach higher potential, IoT simply requires flexibility and management of workloads. Well, there are several other considerations while selecting IoT vendors, such as repeat customers, ecosystem partners, trust, cost-effectiveness, and proven experience.

Wrapping Up

When selecting IoT vendors for cloud-native development services, there are several considerations, such as proven experience, cost-effectiveness, repeat customers, ecosystem partners and trust. The technology leaders and CIOs must consider their technology decisions carefully to make the most out of the IoT for the long-term rather than be disrupted in the short-run.