Just as an architect’s expertise is needed in the construction of a sturdy home, one must also consider architectural needs in a successful IoT strategy. As a leading consumer and industrial IoT platform provider, Exosite seeks to assist companies understand the necessary pieces to consider when developing a connected product and system.

The Internet of Things is quickly transforming how companies do business.  With readily available data, companies are seizing new opportunities, developing state-of-the-art connected products, and creating new revenue streams. Easy access to data is the pinnacle of a successful IoT solution. It can also be the weakest link.  Every successful IoT strategy needs to consider the security of the data being handled. As our Security in Internet of Things Systems white paper illustrates, this can be thought of in three contexts. The first context and the focus of this IoT security blog segment is data at rest.

Developing a successful IoT strategy entails a large number of pieces. Just as a puzzle is not complete until each of it’s unique pieces are in their proper places, an IoT solution is not finished until each element has been properly developed. As a leading consumer and industrial IoT platform provider, Exosite is continuously striving to assist companies connect the necessary pieces to create their perfect IoT picture. In this segment of our Solving the IoT Puzzle: Build or Buy? white paper dissection, we will be covering the necessary pieces of a successful IoT solution.

Our vision is to connect every device in the world in a way that matters to people–with our Murano platform, our goal is to remove barriers to innovation for the Internet of Things (IoT) to see this vision become a reality. To foster this innovation, Exosite takes a fundamental stance of openness with our IoT platform tools and technologies: we publicly document our APIs, we support integrations with other software and platforms (including community-submitted integrations), we open-source software that lives on other’s products, we encourage re-use of community-sourced innovations, and we always strive to support the latest frameworks and design patterns.

Last week we released our newest white paper, Solving the IoT Problem: Build or Buy? As a leading consumer and industrial IoT platform provider, Exosite strives to bring new insight to the IoT market in the hopes of assisting the public. In this new blog series, we will be dissecting sections of this white paper to gain a better understanding of what building or buying an IoT platform entails.

Developing an IoT ecosystem can be very complex and, as a leading industrial IoT platform provider, Exosite is here to help develop your business's connected solution.

Whether in large scale industrial IoT applications or connected consumer good applications, efficiency driven by data is a key selling point. In order for an IoT analytics strategy to be complete, a company must understand the use cases and importance of prescriptive analytics. The final stage of IoT data analytics maturity involves deriving actionable items from predictions made in previous stages. When thousands of IoT connected devices are online and their data is being routed through various machine-learning algorithms, they can provide users and administrators with incredibly valuable insights into what the fleet is doing and what action should be taken to modify its future behavior. The previous descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive IoT analytics blog segments took the process one step closer to no-touch decision making; prescriptive analytics takes it the rest of the way.

Conversations about IoT are typically awkward or inconclusive.

The IoT marketplace is quickly becoming filled with more and more companies rushing in with hopes to hit the market with their solutions first. Because of this tech-race, we are seeing a growing number of IoT security disaster stories. Whether a company is seeking a consumer or an industrial IoT platform provider, security must be a priority.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is shifting the competitive landscape for organizations big and small, fast and slow, old and new, and throughout nearly every industry. The decreasing cost of sensors, processing power, bandwidth, memory, and storage are enabling progressive companies to Internet-enable their machines and environments to take advantage of a number of opportunities to: drive new sources of revenue, decrease operational expenses, increase quality, increase market share, improve competitive positioning, better understand users, improve customer service, and increase aftermarket sales.

Meant to change the world we live in, the Internet of Things can be an ambiguous term that means a variety of things to different people. It’s in a constant state of flux, with new evolutions and possibilities emerging every second. For the last seven years, Exosite has been assisting some of the world’s largest organizations create their IoT strategies and now that knowledge is at your fingertips.  Whether you’re at the beginning of your IoT business transformation or stuck somewhere along the middle, we’re here to answer your questions.  To that end, we’ve created Inside Exosite, a video and blog series that answers the questions companies face every day as they navigate the revolutionary world of IoT.

Following our previous IoT analytics blog segment, this series continues to break down key predictive analytic features and this week focuses on data classification. Classification is one of the most applicable concepts to IoT solution providers when trying to predict device failure. Classification entails grouping device behavior by outcome into buckets, the number of which varies based on the specific application. To continue the elevator example referenced in previous analytic blog segments, cluster analysis suggested that elevators maintenanced within a certain time frame will have more downtime than is preferred. However, when one elevator is being repaired or replaced, one or more of the other elevators will have increased runtime, sometimes beyond the preferred thresholds. This would be cause for concern if an elevator was serviced more than twelve months ago, but otherwise is not a problem. A classification algorithm is capable of taking all of these variables (and many, many more) into consideration and can notify the appropriate party in the event that a combination of variables is met that indicate significant downtime could be imminent. By dividing these outcomes into different behavioral buckets, unexpected downtime and loss of time, money, and customer satisfaction can be avoided.

I founded Exosite with the vision of connecting every device in the world in a way that matters to people. Not connectivity for connectivity’s sake, but connectivity with a purpose–with the mission of transformation. Many of our original team–all of whom are still with Exosite today–have product realization backgrounds. We were professional thing makers before starting and building Exosite. We knew first hand the challenges not only of product design, but also of manufacturing, deployment, support, and maintenance. When we created a new type of software, we did so by designing the workflows and the business environment surrounding device connectivity that would allow the full product life cycle of connected products to be a reality.

As IoT security becomes a growing concern, it seems every week there are new hacking incidents in the media. With consumer products like Nest seemingly having issues with the security of their data retention, are other industries also in danger? The industrial IoT market is quickly growing with more and more companies adding thousands of devices to a single factory and then replicating this process across hundreds of factories.

There's a problem that everyone from developers to accountants keeps running into. You need to send some sensitive data (passwords, financial spreadsheets, etc.) to somebody. How do you do it? Email? HipChat? Slack? A USB stick? All of these have drawbacks. With email or instant messaging, the sensitive data may be stored somewhere out on the Internet indefinitely. Are you sure Atlassian or Slack will never, ever get hacked? All of these have drawbacks. With a USB stick, you have to make sure to wipe the stick securely once you're done, lest you drop it somewhere and somebody with too much time on his or her hands and a penchant for mischief picks it up. Sure, you could use GPG, but try getting somebody who has never used GPG before to set it up and use it correctly, especially if their only email account is webmail.