Streamline Your IoT Journey on AWS with IoTConnect Platform as a Service

By Vamshi M Damera, Sr. Solution Architect – Softweb Solutions, an Avnet Company
By Anshita Solanki, Sr. Content Writer – Softweb Solutions, an Avnet Company
By Tomo Sakatoku, Principal Solutions Architect – AWS
By Ben Cooke, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Avnet

The importance of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions continues to grow with the rising number of connected devices. Vast amounts of data generated by IoT devices can be used to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and create new business opportunities.

On the other hand, customers often struggle to develop a solution that leverages the big volume of data for businesses. In this post, we’ll explore why building IoT solutions is challenging and how Avnet’s IoTConnect platform is Amazon Web Services (AWS) qualified and helps transform data effective to business.

Building IoT solutions requires a set of skills and expertise, and the process of IoT development can be overwhelming for even experienced development teams. There are several challenges faced throughout the IoT journey, including:

• Interoperability: IoT devices are often developed by different manufacturers and run on different platforms. This makes it difficult to create integrated solutions that work seamlessly across different devices and platforms.
• Data management: IoT fleets can generate vast amounts of data, which can be difficult to manage and analyze. It needs specialized tools and knowledge to gather, handle, and analyze data in meaningful and useful ways.
• Cost: Developing smart solutions can be expensive, especially when it comes to hardware development and deployment. This can be a barrier for entry of smaller organizations and startups in the IoT arena.

Avnet is an AWS Select Tier Services Partner that helps innovators turn good ideas into great products.

IoTConnect Platform as a Service

To solve issues related to IoT devices, data, or cost, it’s essential to implement a thorough strategy before beginning your IoT journey. Choose the right tools and technologies that address your use case effectively, as a comprehensive suite of tools and services allows you to manage IoT devices, data, and applications.

With extensive features, an IoT platform can simplify and streamline the development and deployment process. One such platform is IoTConnect, is a multi-purpose, developer-friendly, middleware platform for building complete end-to-end IoT solutions. It brings together IoT hardware, software, data analytics, and AI.

Equipped with a feature-rich toolkit, IoTConnect is easy to use and significantly reduces complexity, cost, and time to market. The platform is based on AWS and enables bi-directional communication between devices and the cloud.

This IoT offering powered by AWS includes consulting, designing, prototyping, and building smart applications. It encompasses integration, support, and managed services to ensure a comprehensive and seamless development of IoT solutions.

The IoTConnect architecture provides a flexible and robust foundation for building and deploying successful IoT solutions. It’s comprised of several key components like device connectivity, data processing, application gateway, and identity services. IoTConnect has been developed based on serverless architecture to keep the platform scalable, secure, and cost effective.

Figure 1 – Avnet’s IoT Connect architecture.

IoTConnect helps users easily connect, monitor, and control IoT devices as well as the data they produce. The platform addresses development challenges by leveraging AWS services as follows:

• Interoperability: Through its decoupled architecture achieved with AWS Lambda, IoTConnect facilitates interoperability with other non-IoTConnect devices and platforms within the same account or ecosystem. By leveraging Lambda’s serverless capabilities, custom functions can be developed that integrate various devices and platforms to enable robust communication and data exchange.
• Data management: With Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon DynamoDB, IoTConnect enables you to store and manage large datasets generated by IoT devices. Moreover, Amazon ElastiCache is used for data caching to improve performance, and enables efficient data processing and analysis to provide you with valuable insights into your operations.
• Cost: IoTConnect offers a range of subscription tiers designed to cater to different customer needs, and provides an accessible entry point to the service. The tiered pricing structure ensures customers can choose the subscription level that aligns with their requirements and budget.

You can download the IoTConnect whitepaper to understand its features in detail.

Accelerate Your IoT Journey with IoTConnect

IoTConnect can help at every stage of the IoT implementation journey, from ideas and needs to value proposition that are transformed into IoT solution. Here’s how:

Simplifying IoT Development Process

Define your use case and start implementing it with IoTConnect. You can accelerate your development process with pre-built connectors and APIs, and the platform offers the ability to integrate with various protocols and devices.

Easy Device Management

To efficiently manage your devices, provision, and configure them, IoTConnect provides a centralized device management dashboard, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and remote management capabilities. Moreover, its integration with AWS IoT Device Management provides a seamless device management experience.

Real-Time Analytics

IoTConnect offers real-time data processing and analytics, customizable dashboards and visualizations, and integration with machine learning (ML) and AI services such as Amazon SageMaker.

Scalability and Security

To ensure IoT solutions can handle increasing device and data volumes, IoTConnect provides horizontal scaling, elastic infrastructure, secure communication protocols, and encryption.

Faster Time to Market

Once your IoT solution or proof of value (PoV) is ready, you need to test and deploy IoT solutions to production. When you develop and deploy IoT solutions or applications, you most likely use complex architectures. You can break up configurations into separate templates to simplify the deployment, which makes configuration replicable and troubleshooting easier.

IoTConnect offers a template–a pre-defined structure–to help you manage and organize all aspects of your device and data management. The template is helpful for the configurations you plan to reuse or for more complex architectures, and allows you to bring your IoT solutions to market faster.

Data Security and Compliance

With so many devices connected to the internet, security is a major concern for many companies. IoT devices are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and securing them requires a multi-layered approach that includes encryption, authentication, and access control.

IoT deployments involve the collection and processing of sensitive data from a wide range of devices and sources, making data security and compliance job zero. One of the most significant threats to IoT security is the lack of encryption on regular transmissions, but there are other concerns like data privacy, device security, network security, and compliance management.

IoTConnect addresses many data security and compliance concerns through its integration with AWS. Having been certified by multiple regulatory bodies including HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2, AWS ensures that IoTConnect users can meet the compliance requirements of their industry and location.

The platform leverages services like AWS Security Hub and AWS Secrets Manager to provide continuous security monitoring and compliance checks. Moreover, it uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to encrypt data at rest and in transit. Amazon Cognito is used to manage user authentication and access control, ensuring that only authorized users can access IoT devices and data.

IoTConnect’s device certification and authentication feature provides an added layer of security, ensuring devices are certified and authorized to connect with the IoTConnect platform and preventing unauthorized access and cyber threats.

With device certification, users can be sure their IoT devices meet industry standards and are compatible with the IoTConnect platform. Once devices are certified, they’re authenticated and authorized to access the platform, ensuring that only trusted devices can communicate with the platform.

Key Differentiators of IoTConnect

• Robust device management: Businesses can manage and monitor their IoT devices at scale, and the platform can handle a wide range of devices and supports remote device management, OTA updates, and device configuration.
• Device authentication: Ensures only authorized devices can access the platform, which helps prevent unauthorized access to IoT devices and data and improves overall security.
• API management: Companies can securely expose their IoT data and functionality to third-party applications. The platform supports REST APIs and provides tools for managing API access, versioning, and documentation.
• Edge computing: Businesses can process IoT data at the edge of the network, closer to the source of the data. This helps reduce latency and bandwidth usage and improve overall system performance.
• Third-party integration: Integrates with a wide range of systems, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence (BI) systems. This allows businesses to gain insights from their IoT data and use it to inform other areas of their operations.

Customer Success: Manufacturing

One of Avnet’s clients, based in the United States, is a leading manufacturer that focuses on finishing products. The company faced several challenges that were impacting the production process, as its production lines are spread across multiple locations which makes it difficult to monitor each one individually.

Without accurate data on the performance of its machines and equipment, the client was unable to identify potential issues before they turned into major problems. This led to increased downtime and reduced productivity, as they needed to take the machines offline for repairs or replacement.

IoTConnect’s multi-microservices-based architecture and preconfigured connectors facilitated swift prototyping and deployment of the company’s smart factory software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. It allowed the client to quickly customize the solution and collect real-time data from various machines and sensors, integrating it with their existing legacy systems.

The IoTConnect platform also allowed the client to create smart rules to automate certain processes. For example, if a machine exceeded a certain temperature, it would automatically shut down to prevent damage. This reduced the risk of equipment failure and improved overall efficiency.

The client achieved the following benefits:

• Reduced operational costs.
• Improved productivity.
• Minimized downtime.

Figure 2 – Sample dashboard for the IoTConnect manufacturing solution.

Customer Success: Healthcare

Traditional clinical trials management systems are often cumbersome, time consuming, and error prone. Another of Avnet’s clients is a healthcare organization that manages multiple data sources, including electronic health records and medical devices.

It was difficult for this company to integrate disparate data into a single system, and the security and privacy of patient data was paramount as any system must meet strict regulatory requirements.

The client used IoTConnect to develop a clinical trials management system that could automate manual processes and collect real-time data from various sources. With several in-built connectors, the client collected real-time data from disparate data sources. Moreover, the reliable and secure IoT ecosystem backed by AWS addressed security concerns.

The client automated its clinical trial management and achieved the following benefits:

• Monitored patient data and outcomes in real-time.
• Streamlined the clinical trial process.
• Improved data accuracy.
• Reduced the cost of managing clinical trials.

Figure 3 – Sample dashboard for the IoTConnect healthcare solution.

Conclusion

The resulting key benefits of IoTConnect and AWS integration include simplicity, secure data, and scalability. This combination accelerates IoT and cloud-connected solution development cycles with the ability to scale IoT solutions to meet changing business needs.

With AWS, you can easily add or remove resources as needed to keep up with the demands of your IoT deployment. IoTConnect enables real-time data analytics and alerts to help organizations make informed decisions quickly.

AWS enhances the capabilities of IoTConnect, providing a reliable and scalable cloud infrastructure that offers advanced security features and compliance certifications. You can accelerate your IoT journey and leverage IoT data to gain insights, optimize operations, and drive innovation. By adding IoTConnect to your strategy, you can enable stakeholders to collaborate efficiently.

Contact the IoT experts at Avnet to see how IoTConnect and AWS can help you achieve your goals and drive innovation in your organization. To better understand the working of this robust platform, refer to the IoTConnect documentation.

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