In an industrial internet of things system, IoT devices need to communicate with each other, on top of being connected to an IoT gateway. By definition, industrial internet of things refers to interconnected sensors, instruments and other devices networked together with computers’ industrial applications.
Why You Need Decent Networking Platforms
Data and Analytics
The Internet of things is basically non-existent without a network to support it. The sensors initiate a massive influx of large amounts of data that needs to be processed in real-time to deduce insights that are of some value. This influx of data has a huge impact on the capabilities of the networking systems in use today.
If the network is unable to keep up, it impedes the data processing and analysis. When you think about scaling up, your current industrial IoT solution for networking will certainly struggle in keeping up with IoT demands in the future.
Computing
IoT setups need to process events and data with minimal latency. This is crucial in delivering useful data to make decisions in real time.
Normally, IoT devices are optimized for power and cost – which limits the computing power available in these devices. This can be remedied by implementing an IoT gateway. On top of this, you can also leverage a network that can support an application hosting environment which allows IoT vendors to host their software locally.
The capacity of the network also decides how the computations on the network elements can be leveraged to run processes like managing traffic.
Connectivity
From a basic approach, IoT is essentially a network of interconnected devices that communicate with each other. To facilitate this, they need committed connectivity to controllers that manage the whole device ecosystem. The connectivity in this case can be either wireless or wired.
The network infrastructure should be able to support the protocols that make the most sense in the IoT setting you are in.
Security
A lot goes into a basic IoT setting, from operational technology to information technology. They all need to be meshed together – which opens up doors to potential attacks from hackers. This makes security a crucial consideration.
It goes without mention that the network needs to evolve to protect and secure the system from attacks that originate from its own infected IoT devices.
Benefits of Networking Platforms
These industrial IoT solutions usually come with different capabilities – some are more advanced than others. What organizations are looking for is to gain better visibility of all connected devices even with the continued increase in the connected devices.
On top of gaining visibility, there is also the need to control the device’s access to the network and apply security to IoT devices that don’t come with embedded security features. There also needs to be regular monitoring of IoT devices on the networking platform so anomalies can be detected fast and rectified even faster and efficiently.
Choosing one of the more complex industrial IoT solutions for networking will give you some extra benefits like these:
Automated IoT Behavioral Monitoring
Advanced network solutions employ machine learning algorithms to learn the expected behavior of network endpoints. On top of basic monitoring, they can automatically trigger alerts and respond accordingly when an endpoint acts unusually.
It uses an unsupervised approach, as in machine learning, to enforce IoT security delivering threat detection and mitigation without human input.
Consistent Policy-Based Security
Complex network solutions offer the ability to easily apply whitelist profiles to IoT devices to limit communication to only what is authorized.
Controlled network access is also provided to ensure that authorized IoT devices are on-board as quickly and efficiently as possible while compromised devices are quickly identified and quarantined from the network.
