INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE BUSINESS
Building IoT applications using
a layer approach
Red Hat’s Patrick Steiner explains how an open standards multi-layer application stack
can meet requirements of IoT in terms of flexibility, scalability, reliability, security.
T
he Internet of Things is changing
business IT and holds great
potential for companies. By
analysing data from networked devices,
they can automate their business
processes, increase productivity and lower
costs. This requires a scalable, reliable and
secure IT infrastructure, which should be
based on standardised components and
protocols and operate on three different
layers: the device layer, the gateway layer
and the datacentre layer.
The Internet of Things networks
intelligent devices of all kinds, such as
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sensors, mobile devices, machines or
vehicles with each other and with the
cloud. The analysis of IoT data offers great
opportunities to companies, they can
make decisions faster, optimise business
processes or develop new applications or
even business models.
In this way, the Internet of Things
impacts nearly every field, energy,
health, transportation, retail, hospitality,
manufacturing and financial services.
This opens up a broad spectrum of
new potential applications, ranging from
intelligent building technology, automated
lighting, energy management, intelligent
manufacturing systems, optimised
solutions for inventories, logistics and
supply chain management to remote
monitoring of vital patient data.
The size and public nature of the
Internet of Things, however, also involves
technological challenges. Network and
system architects have to optimise the
IT infrastructure in order to meet the
demanding requirements of IoT in terms of
scalability, reliability and security.
The Internet of Things poses entirely
new challenges for scalability. In the IDC
study, Worldwide Internet of Things 2013–
2020 Forecast, the market researcher
states that more than 220 billion devices
will be connected via Internet of Things
by 2020. A single intelligent system could
collect and analyse billions of data objects
from millions of different endpoints.
This will place unprecedented demand
on processor performance, storage and
networks.
IoT-based applications and automated
business processes also place higher
demands on availability of the system.
Many intelligent systems are used for
mission-critical applications, and system
failures can lead to lowered productivity,
dissatisfied customers or drop in sales.
The same is true for emergency services,
medical applications and monitoring
solutions. In these cases, a system failure
can endanger property, the environment,
people’s health or even lives.
Distributed IoT solutions create largescale security challenges, since the systems
are networked over the Internet and use
processing capacity and storage resources
from the cloud. That is why companies
Issue 02
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS