Selecting the right IoT platform is one of the most consequential decisions an industrial organization can make, directly influencing how effectively it can scale data collection, integrate AI-driven analytics, and maintain cybersecurity across connected assets. In this guide, IIoT World breaks down the critical requirements every operations leader and technology buyer should evaluate before committing to a platform, covering scalability, interoperability, edge processing, data management, and security. Whether you are building a predictive maintenance program, deploying digital twins, or connecting legacy equipment to modern analytics pipelines, understanding these platform requirements will help you avoid costly misalignments and accelerate time to value in your Industrial IoT strategy.
When organizations are contemplating bringing a new IoT product to market, the questions typically asked are:
“Do we build our own platform and then develop our IoT product? Or, do we develop our IoT product on a platform that already exists?”
Considerations for Building an IoT Platform
Here are some common requirements to consider when developing an IoT product.
1. An IoT Platform should be highly available and scalable.
An IoT platform should be highly available with minimal downtime so that your customers can always access your product. It should be scalable and allow you to add more devices or more payloads from existing devices that automatically scale with every device and/or payload.
As you can imagine, building a highly scalable and available platform is a difficult task that requires a lot of time and resources. The value an IoT platform gives you is high availability and scalability from day one without hiring additional resources, such as dev op engineers or allocating time at the start of your project building a platform before you can start developing your product.
Further reading: The Industrial Internet of Things & Network Security Standards
2. An IoT Platform should securely connect data to the Cloud.
An important part of any IoT platform is easily and securely getting data to the cloud. This data can come from many different places, such as sensors, devices, or 3rd party databases/services.
Rather than focusing on getting this data to the cloud, you want to spend most of your time building the branded user interface and analytics part of your product, where your customers will get the most value. A platform should simplify bringing data in securely by having authentication methods already built-in. This allows for less of a need for SDKs or lower-level code to get the data out of the device to the cloud and provides an easy way to update the sensor or device on the fly as needed. Clodless IIoT: is this possible?
Read the full post from Losant for 4 more items to consider when developing an IoT product.
About the Author
Kevin Niemiller is a Solutions Architect at Losant. He uses his factory floor background in automation and systems integration to develop the Losant platform by connecting new software, hardware, and cloud products. When he’s not working, Kevin enjoys time with his wife and kids; making his own home more intelligent with IoT; and maintaining his blog.
Learn more about how manufacturers can benefit from IIoT initiatives at IIoT World’s Digital Manufacturing Day on December 8, 2021. The first 500 tickets are free, so register today.
FAQ Section
1.
What are the most important requirements when evaluating an IoT platform for industrial use?
Two of the most fundamental requirements are high availability and scalability. An IoT platform should operate with minimal downtime so that customers can always access the product, and it should scale automatically to accommodate more devices or larger data payloads from existing devices without requiring additional DevOps resources. Organizations should also evaluate whether the platform securely connects device data to the cloud, which is a core function of any industrial IoT deployment.
2. Should an organization build its own IoT platform or use an existing one?
This is one of the central questions organizations face when bringing a new IoT product to market: build a proprietary platform first, or develop the product on an existing platform. Building a highly scalable and available platform from scratch requires significant time and resources, including dedicated DevOps engineering. Using an existing IoT platform delivers high availability and scalability from day one, allowing development teams to focus on the product itself rather than the underlying infrastructure.
3. What security requirement should an industrial IoT platform meet?
An industrial IoT platform should securely connect device data to the cloud. The article identifies secure data transmission as an important part of any IoT platform, ensuring that data flowing between devices and cloud systems remains protected throughout the connection.
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