Iot and Cloud Computing

One of the chief drivers behind cloud IoT growth is cost efficiency. The proliferation of cheaper and smarter IoT sensors means that a business may now capture data from thousands of sensors, each of which demands computational power, which has associated hardware and energy costs to process.

IoT in the cloud takes advantage of the cloud’s pay-as-you-go (PAYG) payment model. PAYG allows users to not only have all the computing and storage capacity that they will ever need but, more importantly, charges them only for the data they store. They’re never overburdened with capacity they’re not using, nor its expense, but neither do they have to scramble to pay for upgraded in-house storage continually.

Robust encryption protects data while it transits between an IoT device and the cloud provider. Transport Layer Security (TLS), such as HTTPS, is used to encrypt data in transit for transport security. Once endpoints are authenticated, the data can be decrypted and verified upon arrival. SSL/TLS certificates can provide authentication profiles for individual devices or groupings of devices. These layers of protection mean there is a very low risk of a successful attack. With proper monitoring, any attack attempts can be dealt with in real-time.

The vast quantities of data that cloud computing can store and process for IoT devices is itself a boon to the sector. The ‘big data’ aspect of information collected from IoT devices has applications for machine learning, for example, and for the kind of pattern recognition that only AI is capable of.

With so much data received, it is easy to arrange for IoT devices to send alerts about potential issues and status updates regularly, helping to improve the function of the devices for all users. Updates on sensor data—including measurements, battery levels, power states, and firmware version data—can also be received regularly.

Likewise, the cloud for IoT can be configured to send out timers and schedules to connected IoT devices. Setup parameters and status update requests can also be sent.

Lightweight messaging protocol MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport) is ideal for IoT cloud applications. MQTT was designed for small sensors and mobile devices, particularly those with high-latency or that function on unreliable networks.

The MQTT protocol allows for bidirectional messaging between an IoT device and a cloud server. With the publish/subscribe pattern for MQTT, the client can communicate directly with the server as their endpoint, decoupling the publisher of a message (or data) from the recipient (subscriber), with messages filtered by topic. The use of topics is an excellent opportunity to access control for devices based on these subscriptions.

MQTT message QoS (Quality of Service) also defines and guarantees the delivery of specific messages between an IoT device and the cloud server. The QoS levels of 0, 1, and 2 allow a user to choose a level of service that matches its network reliability and define whether delivery is attempted at most once, at least once, or exactly once.