Cloud Solutions for Your IoT Strategy

For instance, large networks of sensors are now used to monitor farm crops and soil, cities’ air pollution, and sewage treatment. Cloud solutions are deployed in conjunction to process the output, perform automation tasks, and provide key information through a dashboard. Making sure these solutions work well with each other, are performing accurately and efficiently, and are integrated in a holistic security approach, is an ever-evolving challenge.

Industrial digital twins is another example where offices, factories, and other manufacturing plants are deploying sensors on windows, doors, and machinery so a software version of the facility can be updated in real-time. The ‘twin’ can therefore create maintenance schedules based on which equipment actually needs to be checked – rather than just checking a pump every month whether the maintenance is needed or not. This can drastically reduce maintenance costs and also improve equipment availability.

Since IoT sensors are usually extremely small with little, or no, local storage, they perform their best when paired with a robust and powerful cloud that has the storage and capabilities to collect and analyze the data.

So, how do we prepare for this next generation of IoT cloud solutions and usage? A cloud that is connected 24/7 to millions of sensors constantly feeding data that require storage and analysis?

Gartner has estimated that 90% of companies with poor public cloud strategies will expose themselves to unnecessary risks. It’s clear that cloud service providers and the IT service companies that help to manage these cloud deployments must take security seriously, but the end-user of the data – the company using the cloud service – must also take their own responsibility seriously.

Basic security hygiene and policies will protect you from most IoT security weaknesses – in many cases devices are installed without even changing the access password! To decisively fix the challenge, however, you must enforce cybersecurity best practices at the management level. That means ensuring that proper configurations, as well as secure authentication, are in place. This creates a bigger than usual challenge for your IoT strategy because of the sheer scale of the number of sensors and devices, but the protection required by each one will be similar.

Cloud solutions will naturally play an important role in your IoT strategy – this cannot be avoided – but think carefully about your network design. When scaling up from just managing users to sensors and devices you may need to revise how best to secure a larger number of devices.