Software development

What Is the Internet of Things IoT? With Examples

The potential applications of IoT are vast and varied, and its impact is already being felt across a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, transportation, healthcare and agriculture. As the number of internet-connected devices continues to grow, IoT is likely to play an increasingly important role in shaping our world and transforming the way we live, work and interact with each other. Internet of Things B2B solutions account for the majority of economic value created from IoT to date. The constant connectivity that IoT enables, combined with data and analytics, provides new opportunities for companies to innovate products and services, as well as to increase the efficiency of operations. Indeed, IoT has emerged as one of the most significant trends in the digital transformation of business and the economy since the 2010s. An IoT application is a collection of services and software that integrates data received from various IoT devices.

iot platform definition

People increasingly used internet-connected devices, such as smartphones and smart TVs, which were all connected to one network and could communicate with each other. IoT has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, microelectromechanical systems, microservices and the internet. This convergence helped tear down the silos between operational technology and information technology, enabling unstructured machine-generated data to be analyzed for insights to drive improvements. IoT can also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to aid in making data collection processes easier and more dynamic.

When should your business use an IoT platform?

IoT products are very complex because they have to integrate multiple components across the 5 layers of the IoT technology stack. Before launching into product development and IoT platform selection, you need to make sure you have a solid IoT product strategy. When people talk about IoT platforms, they often launch into technical jargon like transport protocols, rules engines, data lakes, etc. While those considerations are important and deserve thoughtful planning, they don’t clearly illustrate how an IoT platform can help you.

  • Fueled by the massive amount of research by companies, universities and governments around the globe, machine learning is a rapidly moving target.
  • Late-generation SCADA systems developed into first-generation IoT systems.
  • Pre-IoT, a large corporate network might have needed to account for 50,000 to 500,000 endpoints being vulnerable to attack, while the IoT may involve a network with millions or tens of millions of these endpoints.
  • This integration improves patient outcomes, reduces hospital readmissions, and enhances the efficiency of healthcare delivery.

Thin edge is often used for applications that rely on low-powered, resource-constrained sensors. IoT edge computing puts data processing closer to the sensors, rather than sending a full stream of data to the cloud. It is an advantage for organizations that have sensors and devices in places with limited connectivity, produce too much data to send to the cloud cost-effectively, or need millisecond response times from analytics.

NIST’s Industrial Wireless Systems Lab Adds Capability to Support IEEE Standards Effort

They’re generative, meaning they’re useful precisely because they make new things possible. It’s easier to give a litany of features than to describe what IoT Platforms mean for you. Fundamentally, IIoT Platforms are tools for improving connectivity, control, and data analysis in industrial environments. When choosing an IoT platform, it’s essential to consider scalability. Evaluate whether the platform can handle the increasing number of devices and data streams as your IoT deployment grows.

Companies that have adopted it reported using it to improve existing processes (67%), predict business performance and industry trends (60%) and reduce risk (53%). IIoT platforms are systems for connecting frontline industrial processes with backend information systems. They include hardware and software and enable organizations to develop new applications. NIST understands the importance of the Internet of Things (IoT) and how it impacts our everyday lives in a big way.

Enhanced Productivity

This section will provide best practices and tips to ensure a successful implementation of an IoT platform, including considerations for data governance, integration strategies, and change management. Discover the immense advantages that come with adopting an IoT platform. From increased operational efficiency to enhanced productivity and cost savings, this section will shed light on the tangible benefits that organizations can derive from leveraging the power of IoT platforms. By outsourcing non-core areas of your product to an IoT platform, you’ll reduce risk, minimize cost, improve quality, and accelerate your time to market.

iot platform definition

Consider the platform’s integration capabilities and its ability to exchange data with existing systems and third-party applications. Philips Healthcare has implemented an IoT platform to revolutionize patient care and management. The platform connects medical devices, electronic health records, and healthcare professionals, enabling real-time monitoring, remote diagnostics, and personalized treatment plans. This integration improves patient outcomes, reduces hospital readmissions, and enhances the efficiency of healthcare delivery. Instead of you contracting with multiple carriers, connectivity platforms provide a single interface for deploying, monitoring, and managing all your devices around the world. These platforms often include additional functionality such as traffic monitoring, connectivity management, geolocation, device management, over-the-air updates, and device provisioning.

Understanding the Role of IoT Platforms in Industry Verticals

They sift through unlabeled data to look for patterns that can be used to group data points into subsets. Most types of deep learning, including neural networks, are unsupervised algorithms. The IoT landscape is constantly evolving, and new trends continue to shape the development of IoT platforms.

iot platform definition

IoT solutions built without the right IoT platform means developers may be forced to shift from building new products to supporting, maintaining and updating existing products. In doing so, IoT maintenance become a cost center—leading to inevitable tradeoffs between sustaining what you have and building new innovative products. IoT is one of the most important technologies and it continues to advance as more businesses realize the potential of connected devices to keep them competitive. IoT enables machines to complete tedious tasks without human intervention. Companies can automate processes, reduce labor costs, cut down on waste and improve service delivery. IoT helps make it less expensive to manufacture and deliver goods, and offers transparency into customer transactions.

What is the Internet of Things (IoT)?

Only when you approach product-market fit and start driving towards deployments at scale, is it time to invest in custom hardware. There are many benefits of leveraging third-party infrastructure to transfer data from the IoT device to the Cloud, including dedicated bandwidth, strict connectivity SLAs, and added security. By taking over the non-differentiated functionality, IoT platforms help you reduce your development risk and cost, and accelerate your product’s time to market. The goal of an IoT platform is to provide all the generic functionality for your application so you can focus on building features that differentiate your product and add value for your customers.

In conclusion, understanding the concept of artificial intelligence machine learning is crucial in today’s interconnected world. With its ability to connect devices, collect and analyze data, and enable intelligent decision-making, an IoT platform serves as the backbone of the IoT ecosystem. By exploring the core components, benefits, features, challenges, and trends, businesses can make informed decisions when selecting and implementing an IoT platform.

Security

This can impact your business model—so ask the questions early, before you select a provider. Section 4 called for NIST to publish a variety of guidance that identifies practices to enhance software supply chain security, with references to standards, procedures, and criteria. The EO also directed NIST to initiate two labeling programs related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and software to inform consumers about the security of their products. The most forward-looking are building Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS) models that package products and services in an integrated offering. Integrate device data with enterprise apps, cloud apps, big data apps, data lakes and third-party ecosystems. Assemble integration flows easily and start automated actions based on IoT events.

It allows you to access IoT device data at both a granular and high-level view. In a thick edge architecture, processing is more decentralized and occurs closer to data collection. Instead of sending sensor data to be processed on a distant server, which would lead to latencies too high to safely respond to sudden changes on the road, a vehicle’s systems process data directly onboard for autonomous navigation. The value of IoT is not in the fleet of devices and sensors an organization is monitoring, but in the accurate and relevant data derived from these IoT devices and sensors. An IoT platform is critical to building an IoT ecosystem, it simplifies IoT, making it more secure, regardless of where you are on your IoT journey to build smart, connected products. Although Ashton’s was the first mention of IoT, the idea of connected devices has been around since the 1970s, under the monikers embedded internet and pervasive computing.

How can IoT improve our lives?

The broad range of techniques ML encompasses enables software applications to improve their performance over time. Platforms allow a direct line between cloud-based or on-premise storage and compute resources and the shop floor. By connecting the sensors and machines that collect data during production runs, they create a direct line between the places and times when data is collected, and the tools needed for analysis. If we think about what platforms do (connect humans, machines, and sensors; create new information flows; extend process control), it’s easy to see why platforms are both hardware and software.