Building Connected Enterprises with AWS IoT

Industry leaders are accelerating their move to digital transformation with end-to-end IoT solutions – for maximizing process efficiencies, optimizing operations, and creating new revenue streams. However, building an IoT solution has its own set of challenges like secure device connectivity, authentication to all connected devices, data storage, processing, and management needs. But with the advent of secure, reliable cloud platforms like AWS, most challenges around developing robust IoT applications are eliminated. Connecting the industrial assets to the cloud, monitoring them, and deriving meaningful insights has now become simple with the help of top IoT consulting companies like Saviant.

Let’s take a walk through the AWS IoT benefits

• Remote management of Enterprise operations

  AWS IoT is capable of reading a device’s current state and setting its state accordingly, even when the device is offline. When it comes online, its current state is merged with its shadow and no messages/updates are lost. Since the latest state of that device is constantly accessible, remote enterprise operations like OS updates, security patches, reboots and factory updates are easily executed for all the connected devices with minimal programming. This feature makes sure that neither the updates are overlapped nor missed.

• Decision-making for data on-the-fly

  AWS IoT provides Analytics that organize and analyze real-time device data without really storing it into the database. Every registered device will have a ‘Thing shadow’ that stores the latest state of that particular device. This concept makes your enterprise app lightweight and keeps the response times to a short and a crisp minimum.

• ML inference for run-time data

  Using hosted Jupyter notebooks, Machine Learning can be applied to your IoT data. By applying Machine Learning algorithms to the device data, you can apply certain criteria to process selective data. For example, by collecting information about a users’ frequently accessed data, AWS IoT can customize options for that user.

• Secure data & device connections

  Core component, AWS IoT Core, is responsible for providing secure authentication and end-to-end encryption for all of its connected devices. In this way, it ensures that there is no transfer of data between devices without the required permission thus making your app highly secure.

• MQTT Protocol availability

  MQTT is a lightweight, messaging protocol that works on the principle of subscribe/publish method on the server. The MQTT protocol minimizes the code footprint on both the cloud and the device, thus increasing performance of your enterprise. It substantially supports massive amounts of data collection and writing rules to handle & publish,them to appropriate users.

Building blocks of AWS IoT services

With the exponential growth in devices, data, and systems, the challenges also increase for the enterprises. AWS IoT offers improved scalability, security, reliability and connectivity for any enterprise. AWS IoT is equipped with a plethora of services mentioned below, that provide the ability to handle and process information on-demand.

• AWS IoT Core

  AWS IoT Core is a robust creation that is capable of managing billions of interconnected devices and trillions of messages. It allows tracking and sending messages even when your devices are offline.

• AWS IoT Device Management

  This service is specifically developed to remotely manage your connected IoT devices. AWS IoT Device Management can register, monitor and secure permissions to manage your devices individually or in bulk.

• AWS Greengrass

  AWS Greengrass is a secure feature, enabling data transfer between devices and between cloud & device after proper authorization. Its ML inference feature can process the data locally by integrating with cloud for analytics, storage and management.

• AWS IoT Analytics

  Analytics is a very important aspect of any IoT solution. AWS IoT Analytics is the simplest way to run high-end analytics on an enormous volume of data without boundaries. It also cleans, filters and transforms raw data into material that can be used for complex calculations.

• Amazon FreeRTOS

  Amazon FreeRTOS is a small-scale OS for microcontrollers that have low-power and minimal processing capabilities. But when these microcontrollers are connected to the all-powerful AWS IoT cloud, its problem-solving features become endless.

• AWS IoT 1-Click

  This feature can either be synced with AWS IoT Enterprise Button as a hardware button or not. AWS IoT 1-Click is interfaced with AWS IoT Core component to provide an interactive experience to the customer, increase brand loyalty etc., on a single click. This app can also be downloaded from the AppStore, select a specific pre-written Lambda function and then ‘1-click’ triggers the required function on specifically selected devices. This increases the functionality of AWS as a whole as it allows selective processing of data.

• AWT IoT Button

  AWS IoT Button service provides programmable buttons on the Amazon Dash Button hardware. These buttons can be incorporated with code to perform enterprise operations like count and track items, switch on/off home appliances etc.

• AWS IoT Device Defender

  In order to maintain the integrity and security of your enterprise app, AWS IoT Device Defender makes sure that all security policies are conformed by all the connected devices. If it detects any sort of deviation from these universally-accepted policies, an alarm is raised to check the device’s authenticity.

Sample Enterprise Use Case – Robust & Scalable Industrial IoT platform for remote monitoring of connected devices and smart data management capabilities

An American Manufacturing Leader wanted a cloud-enabled IIoT platform to connect, track and monitor its Enterprise Gateways (EG), that connects up to 30 end-devices that are installed across the manufacturing facilities. The company needed smart device management and secure data management system that can manage connected end-devices and measurement & control data; including Temperature, Humidity, Dew point or Pressure. It would also provide real-time visibility of the collected EG data for the end-customers to take corrective actions based on the alarms/configurations. The company engaged Saviant to build the solution that would help them overcome all their challenges.

This robust IIoT platform allows the client to connect multiple Enterprise Gateways (EG) to the Cloud, where each EG can handle up to 30 end-devices. The platform operates with data collection frequency of 1min to an hr, and supports device management & smart data management capabilities to house millions of data records per day, enabling real-time visibility of measurement & control data.

Businesses that run without Amazon web services have impaled in comparison to those that do and this is evident from the optimal performance combined with superior security measures provided by AWS IoT. Due to AWS IoT being a complete package for business solutions, all businesses and customers using this technology benefit by a huge margin of success.