Cloud Computing & IoT: Scalability, Security, and Lower Costs

IoT and Cloud Computing represent two distinct technologies. While Cloud Computing deals with the distribution of services (server, storage, database ...) through the Internet (Cloud), the IoT indicates the set of intelligent devices that once connected to the network allow data sharing via the Internet. Today, companies, especially those active in the Industry 4.0 sector, have an increasing number of data to process, store and share, which increasingly concern sensors and IoT devices. Therefore, the union of the two technologies allows managing large amounts of data that can be analysed to develop hypotheses and conclusions regarding the most diverse and varied types of data. In these contexts, the benefits of cloud computing about the IoT sector are many and concern in particular:

• - Scalability

One of the advantages of integrating IoT devices with the cloud is scalability. Server scaling generally requires the purchase of hardware and the correct configuration. In the case of cloud architecture, the addition of new resources results in the use of a more efficient virtual server or in the increase in storage space, both of which can be performed faster and less complicated.

• - Security

If generally when the servers are maintained by the company, the security problems depend on the security practices implemented by the company itself, in the case of cloud architectures security is ensured by the possibility of having up-to-date software and firmware and monitoring 24/7 insured by service providers.

• - Costs

In-house systems generally have high installation and maintenance costs, related to hardware and personnel. For the cloud, things are very different, the initial costs are minimal, and the price plans are always very flexible. In this way the costs become predictable, the downtimes are minimal, and the worry of possible hardware problems does not become a priority.

It is evident that the benefits deriving from the union of the two technologies become necessary depending on the requirements and the limitations related to the specific use case to be realized, but it is equally clear that the integration of the cloud with the IoT world offers significant advantages in most applications.