Mountain View, California, May 17, 2017: Google has launched a Internet of Things (IoT) management service called Google Cloud IoT Core.
According to a post on its official blog, Cloud IoT Core makes it easy to securely connect globally distributed devices to GCP, centrally manage them and build rich applications by integrating with a customer’s data analytics services.
When used as part of a broader Google Cloud IoT solution, Cloud IoT Core will give customers access to new operational insights that can help business react to, and optimize for, change in real time.
This advantage has value across multiple industries; for example:
- Utilities can monitor, analyse and predict consumer energy usage in real time
- Transportation and logistics firms can proactively stage the right vehicles/vessels/aircraft in the right places at the right times
- Oil and gas and manufacturing companies can enable intelligent scheduling of equipment maintenance to maximize production and minimise downtime
Google feels this is the right time for such a platform. Here’s why:
Many enterprises that rely on industrial devices such as sensors, conveyor belts, farming equipment, medical equipment and pumps — particularly, globally distributed ones — are struggling to monitor and manage those devices for several reasons:
- Operational cost and complexity: The overhead of managing the deployment, maintenance and upgrades for exponentially more devices is stifling. And even with a custom solution in place, the resource investments required for necessary IT infrastructure are significant.
- Patchwork security: Ensuring world-class, end-to-end security for globally distributed devices is out of reach — or at least not a core competency — for most organizations.
- Data fragmentation: Despite the fact that machine-generated data is now an important data source for making good business decisions, the massive amount of data generated by these devices is often stored in silos with a short expiration date, and hence never reaches downstream analytic systems (nor decision makers).
Cloud IoT Core is designed to help resolve these problems by removing risk, complexity and data silos from the device monitoring and management process. Through a single pane of glass, customers can ingest data generated by all those devices into a responsive data pipeline — and, when combined with other Cloud IoT services, analyse and react to that data in real time.
Image Credit: Google