For something that is woven into the philosophy of the Internet of Things, large scale IoT deployments receive surprisingly little attention. Think about it: we want a world of connected devices that all speak to one another. Smart cities, smart cars, wearables and more. Unfortunately, many companies aren’t planning for these advancements in technology.
Many companies faced with the challenge of a large scale IoT project struggle to know where to start their planning. To assist companies with IoT project deployment, I’ve outlined key factors to consider before deploying an IoT project.
There are five pillars to any IoT project: devices, connectivity, device management, data processing, and application. It’s vital to consider these pillars before launching an IoT project. Large scale IoT deployments, in particular, come with their own set of challenges that could potentially put a business at risk.
All IoT projects rely on devices. Any large scale IoT deployment will likely have a variety of new and legacy devices that use different technologies and serve multiple purposes ultimately reflecting the evolution of the IoT field and the scope of your deployment. Because of this, interoperability is key.
To keep IoT deployments afloat and avoid proprietary lock-in, it’s important not to sink your money into anything that works exclusively with only one vendor, one platform, or one technology. Otherwise, you may discover that you’ve been forever married to a proprietary solution that looked like a great idea a couple of years ago, but now isn’t compatible.
When choosing devices it’s vital to also consider connectivity. After all, the devices need to support your preferred connectivity standard. Many businesses don’t give connectivity a second thought and instead, settle for Wi-Fi or any other popular wireless technology. Meanwhile, your project might have very specific needs and require connectivity in areas where Wi-Fi isn’t available. Furthermore, your devices might be too resource-constrained to even use Wi-Fi. At this point, it may be in a business’s best interest to consider cellular connectivity, turning attention to cellular IoT. Low power consumption and long battery life of cellular connectivity will ensure devices are accessible almost everywhere.
When first deploying a project, it’s likely that only a small sample of devices are being used to test if a company is interested in truly pursuing a large-scale IoT deployment. When testing a small number of devices, a false send of safety may set in that your solution can be managed manually at scale. However, once a project has begun to scale, it’s impossible to perform even the most basic operations such as onboarding, configuration, security patches, maintenance, etc. manually if there are thousands of connected devices.
It’s also possible that some of the devices deployed are hard to reach. Perhaps you have devices six feet under the ground to collect soil data or devices in the ocean to track marine life.
