How Cloud Computing is Assisting the Internet of Things (IoT) Revolution

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of the internet-connected devices around us. The proliferation of IoT has reached a critical mass where the amount of information is posing a problem to our current infrastructure. It is creating new challenges for our network traffic and storage devices. Cloud computing is helping out with these challenges. The success of IoT will depend on how effectively it can use the cloud to keep growing.

Understanding the Cloud in the Context of IoT

IoT is the concept of multiple interconnected devices. On the other hand, the cloud is hidden infrastructure.

We can understand the concept of IoT and the cloud using your home network. Suppose you have a bunch of home security devices like sensors and cameras. These devices are connected to your home computer. All the information collected from these sensors are stored on your hard drive. You basically have an Internet of Things in your house.

Soon you realize that your computer is slowing down due to all the processing of these devices and your hard disk is getting full. Also, there is a new requirement. You want to monitor your office too. It will require a new computer for processing and storing data. But this new setup means that your home data and office data will be in separate places. A viable solution to the problem is the cloud.

Instead of processing and saving data on your personal computer, you can use the cloud. Cloud service providers will take care of maintaining the hardware requirements. You can just request the amount of processing power and storage space you need.

In the cloud, you will have your home and office security data in the same place. You can use an analytical program to find out how many hours you spend in your house, in your office, and on the road. You have all the data in one place with better processing power and larger storage space than your personal and office computers.

Cloud Computing Facilitating the IoT Change

From the above simple example, we can see how cloud computing is helping IoT devices talk to each other easily and affordably. When companies maintain their own computers or servers for processing and storage, companies need large data centers.

Data centers are expensive and time consuming to maintain. In order to increase capacity and meet demands, companies have to predict and order hardware months ahead to keep their data centers ready for an increase in demand. This model is not scalable in an IoT environment where the amount of data can change from day to day. Also, the distributed nature the IoT devices make it difficult for data centers to provide proximity. Long distances between the devices and data centers can slow down communication.

Cloud computing services have data centers all around the world with data replication technology in place. This makes it convenient to collect IoT data and move it around easily. Also, cloud service providers operate hyperscale data centers. The economies of scale of these data centers keep the costs down for IoT processing and storage.

Today major cloud service providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure have IoT specific services.

The Next Evolution

Cloud computing is evolving to deal with IoT performance issues. Service providers are creating solutions to process information on the edge of the cloud. Instead of data traveling to the data centers, it can be directly processed on the edge devices.

Going back to the cloud-connected home and office example, if your sensors need to trigger the home security alarm, the signal has to travel to the cloud data center and come back to your home. If the data center is far away, the signal has to travel a significant distance. It is expensive to set up data centers in every possible location. So cloud service providers are setting up gateways, industrial PCs, and micro data centers to have more processing power nearer to the IoT devices. With more service providers adopting this approach, IoT performance will improve.