How to Design Your Business’ IoT Architecture

The Internet of Things generates a lot of data. How much, you say? Cisco Systems projects that total data generated by all people, machines, and things will reach 600 zettabytes by 2020. Compared with the total traffic over the internet, which crossed the 1 zettabyte threshold at the end of 2016, IoT traffic is becoming a beast.

How can a company wrangle value out of all the data traversing its IoT ecosystem?

Companies will need to find the appropriate spot in their IoT workflows to process data in order to determine how to reap value from it. As BizTech explained here, organizations have three options for data processing beyond the data center: at the edge, in the fog or in the cloud. How your organization architects its compute environment will ultimately make or break your IoT initiative.

Organizations need to lay out a vision for their IoT deployments to determine the data they want to extract. “Always start with a problem statement — what in your operations do you need to fix?” suggests Rob Enderle, owner and principal analyst of the Enderle Group. “It’s going to be different for every company. Pick the IoT path that best solves that problem.”

To get at the problem, some organizations are turning to Six Sigma methodology, developed by Bill Smith and Mikel Harry in 1986 while they were working at Motorola. Six Sigma is an approach to improving the overall quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing problems and defects.

“You need to figure out what the key data is,” explains Chet Hullum, general manager of industrial solutions at Intel. “Where can you get the biggest bang, and where are the biggest bottlenecks that are impacting your business? Matching Six Sigma ideas to your IoT deployment, you can see where you should put your compute power and where you will need more horizontal computing.”

As part of this problem-solving process aimed at designing an architecture, organizations need to consider their current environment. There is often legacy equipment in use that is not IP-compatible and thus not IoT-ready.

“The market is pushing manufacturers to take their data and turn it into action. At Intel, we end up working in a lot of ‘brownfield’ environments,” says Hullum. “These are legacy facilities that have a good process in place. We work to figure out how to integrate into that environment.”

Integrating legacy operational technology and information technology is a heavy lift. OT, Gartner notes, “is hardware and software that detects or causes a change through the direct monitoring and/or control of physical devices, processes and events in the enterprise.”

As Link Simpson, the IoT and digital transformation practice lead at CDW, points out, this integration also extends to the professionals who work within these once-separate environments. Roles and responsibilities will be affected by a move to IoT, so smart change management within the organization is key to a successful deployment.

As the architecture is mapped out, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to IoT computing is important.