Cloud computing and the rise of IoT brokers….

Within the growing concepts of the Internet of Things is the data of the Internet of Things (IoT, meet DIoT). This is the data, and resulting analytics produced by IoT devices and often handled without human interaction, knowledge or any involvement. The example I always use is the reality of video surveillance feeds. All security feeds are critical, if something happens and well useless if nothing happens. The easy button there is only capturing range of camera vision motion. Then you always have a video of the motion. You don’t however, have a video of 23.5 hours of empty sidewalk in front of your building.

The concept of IoT broker will be two fold initially. The first piece of the broker is the ability transfer the data produced by IoT devices between multiple cloud providers. Three of them, AWS, IBM and Microsoft have existing IoT gateways. Google has one in Beta, and many of the other providers outside the US do as well (have an IoT device gateway). There are limited standards and limited rules for the gateways today, so the reality is you need the IoT broker to move the data from the various sources.

Now, the minute you have two clouds involved in a process you run the risk of increasing the cost remarkably. The cloud providers charge you for data out, so that forces you to consider the reality of where your data is going to live. For IoT data, today, I recommend the data be in the most cost effective place for your organization. Say you have systems that generate 100 megs of data per day. Inbound to a cloud won’t cost you. Outbound from the cloud to other providers will cost you. Your organizational IoT goal has to be focused on only moving data when it has to be moved. There are some storage solutions you can consider, keeping the data on premise and moving it to a cloud provider as needed. Inbound is cheap or even free for CSP’s. Outbound is where you can end up paying through the nose. If you have data that is static (moves to the cloud and is referenced there), it is a good fit. If you don’t and your data needs to be accessed, moved and ultimately places in multiple clouds, it may be time to consider onsite or on premise storage solutions to reduce your overall cost.