IoT (Internet of Things) is a very broad concept, covering everything from wearable items, remote sensors, smart home devices and cars. A subcategory of IoT is the concept of Industrial IoT (IIoT), applying IoT in an industrial context.
IIoT is an enabler for Industry 4.0. It opens the door to creating many new business and market opportunities. You could say that Industrial IoT is an evolution of the classical distributed control systems (DCS) in that it takes advantage of the benefits that IoT offers. Enablers such as secure and easy connectivity, lightweight setup and edge computing capabilities provide increased flexibility, reduced costs and improved competitiveness.
Tricloud can help companies facilitate the transition to IIoT by providing deep technical knowledge and experience of planning, designing and implementing industrial IoT solutions that can help realize new business opportunities such as:
Large-scale IoT solutions potentially produce vast amounts of data from a variety of sources like sensors, equipment and system integrations. One of the key problems is being able to ingest and process the data as it is received. IoT devices are often constrained by network latency and bandwidth limitations, and further complicating the task, data types are often very diverse.
An approach to optimizing data ingestion is to distribute computation. Edge hardware is also becoming increasingly capable of performing complex processing, including the possibility to aggregate, pre-process, filter or enrich data. Instead of processing all data centrally in the cloud, computation can be distributed and brought closer to the data source – to the edge.
An edge solution has several other advantages over traditional IoT solutions.
Latency and scalability: Processing data at the edge reduces latency since data must travel a shorter distance. Additionally, it provides the opportunity to carefully select what to send back to the cloud. When you only send the data that you really need, you potentially reduce the volume of data drastically as well as network bandwidth and cloud ingestion resources.
Data captured by edge devices can contain sensitive information such as video or audio streams. When processing data on the edge, it is possible to keep sensitive data private by only sending the anonymized result to the cloud. The sensitive data never leave the device, thus reducing the risk of security breaches.
Another feature of edge applications is the possibility of autonomous operation. The key to obtaining this is to reduce dependencies towards central systems by allowing data processing to run independently from cloud functionality. Machine learning models, tag configurations or other data required to perform the processing of data can be stored directly on the edge device. This ensures continuous operation even during an internet outage. Data integrity is ensured by implementing two-way (upstream and downstream) asynchronous communication, where data is buffered in the event of a network outage and forwarded (store-and-forward) as soon as the connection is restored. Autonomous and offline operation results in better uptime, and in the end, improved data quality.
Security is paramount when cloud-enabling a device, machine or even an entire factory. Tricloud builds systems based on software from Microsoft that was designed with security in mind. Using industry standards and best practices in designing IoT security, we ensure that assets are kept safe and communication remains uncompromised and private. All communication between devices and the cloud is kept confidential and tamper-proof through TLS encrypted communication where X.509 certificates provide authentication of the device. Communication is always initiated from the device, which means that devices have no internet-facing ports open, reducing the attack surface. Our solutions support hardware-level security TPM (Trusted Platform Module), which ensures that secrets on a device, like connection strings and private keys, are kept secret if a device is compromised. Edge applications run in isolated environments (containers) within the devices without direct internet access to ensure that the OT network (factory floor) is not connected directly to the internet. Connectivity is provided through a security proxy. Advanced analytics for automatic security monitoring and intrusion detection can be applied to detect any anomalies from each individual device and connected networks. In the event of a breach, the impact can be minimized by revoking privileges for a single device or a group of devices.
Edge applications can be implemented on different types of hardware, ranging from small and simple system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices to embedded high-performance devices and even existing server infrastructure. At Tricloud, we have partnered with a vendor of embedded hardware solutions and can deliver many kinds of distributed processing solutions for different environments and in accordance with different standards (MDD, ISO13485, IEC60601 and IEC61010).
Tricloud develops customized edge solutions that meet the customer’s individual needs. Our solution accelerator framework reduces development time from months, or even years, to a matter of weeks. Our production-grade high-quality framework reduces risk and Time to Market substantially. Tricloud uses Azure IoT Edge Runtime (https://azure.microsoft.com/da-dk/services/iot-edge/) for implementing Edge Solutions in combination with IoT Hub and Device Provisioning Service. Azure IoT Edge Runtime supports different hardware setups, ranging from small and simple embedded devices to reusing existing server infrastructure.
Handling devices at scale presents an entire new set of challenges. Handling thousands of devices requires a high degree of automation and carefully thought-out management strategies. Provisioning of new devices must be automated while maintaining device configuration. Devices may have different configurations depending on customer, location or other properties. At the same time, devices can be distributed physically, which can trigger legal restrictions, latency issues or other challenges that require the use of multiple data centers. Microsoft provides a Device Provisioning Service (DPS) that allows provisioning and management of devices at scale, which is supported by the Tricloud solution accelerator framework.