Last week, I talked about how important it is for you to avoid development lock-in. This week, I want to talk in more detail about a few of the challenges that you will face.
Don’t get locked into specific IoT sensors or actuators.
New products come onto the market daily, and the capabilities of all IoT hardware expands exponentially quarter over quarter. Your IoT platform should isolate the devices from the business information and business rules.
For example, different temperature sensors all do the same kind of thing but might use different protocols and data formats to deliver more or less the same type of information. You should be able to configure the information you need for your IoT application within your IoT platform so that you can use any temperature sensor you want from any manufacturer. The configuration of new sensors should take less than an hour without any coding required.
Don’t get locked into your choices of infrastructure elements.
Your IoT platform should isolate you from the idiosyncrasies of infrastructure elements like databases, cloud providers, transport protocols, security protocols and more. New features are added to infrastructures and/or new ones become available. Your IoT platform should allow you to switch out foundations and adopt what you need when you need it.
For example, your IoT implementation started with an AI solution from company A, and now a new company B is bringing another AI solution to the market which is more suited to your needs. Your platform should be able to configure for company B’s product and route all the appropriate data streams for processing.