IoT technology has been a paradigm shift over the past few years, revolutionizing the industry as we know it today. When it comes to managing hundreds, thousands or even millions of intelligent assets in a hyper-connected way to optimize product lifecycle, business operation, or user experience in an efficient way, we have to strongly value all the needs and competitive advantages that can directly influence organizations for their continuous improvement.
But before knowing in depth all its direct benefits, let's review some key concepts.
What do we mean by Industrial IoT?
Popularly known as Industry 4.0, the IIoT or Industrial Internet of Things are the set of intelligent devices, instruments and microservices connected through the internet in an automated way that allow to improve the efficiency of industrial processes and reduce operating costs through the massive collection of data in real time.
To get a slight idea, all the wearables that we can use on a daily basis, allow us to know first-hand our health status, the correct performance of an activity or the anticipation of performing a certain task according to our data history.Therefore, if we apply it to the industrial sector, we can take it to the next level and determine, for example, manufacturing capacity, the implementation of much more flexible cloud solutions or the provision of much more effective decision making in a totally delocalized way, as long as these systems are networked, such as: the use of sensors, GPS locators, computer applications, or edge computing technology for example.
5 Benefits of the Industrial Internet of Things and case studies in cloud environments
There is a wide range of IoT solutions that can be applied to multiple industry sectors such as manufacturing, energy, healthcare or logistics due to their enormous versatility in terms of how they can be measured, and especially if all the integration capabilities that cloud environments allow are taken advantage of. However, let us highlight its multiple benefits:
Improved process efficiency:
By automating IoT devices in a business intelligence portal, it is possible to know in real time the manufacturing performance of a given plant by integrating industrial data systems such as SQL, ERP or SCADA under a single data integration platform.
Ex: Power BI Embedded allows the creation of reports in Power BI through the applications themselves, portals or web pages to have centralized in the workspace all business analytics.
Leveraging Advanced Analytics:
The thousands or millions of data collected can be cross-referenced with big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence or other sources of information to thus have predictive business intelligence.
Ex: Azure Cognitive Search allows us to leverage large-scale content identification using semantic search, machine learning models and cognitive skills based on vision, language and voice to derive content classification that recognizes user intent to boost responsiveness.
Improved security:
IoT systems can much more quickly and accurately detect the specific failure of a manufacturing machinery or event response through their sensing systems and immediately alert workers and operators of a manufacturing plant, greatly reducing the number of human errors and accidents during the exercise of their operability that can even affect the introduction of security breaches associated with this human factor.
Ex: Azure IoT Hub and Azure Sphere offer a secure communication solution between IoT applications and any device through a telemetry system that allows factory operators to ensure the accessibility and security of their activity information remotely thanks to a device authentication system. On the other hand, Microsoft Defender for IoT is a security solution for threat detection and prevention of the entire IoT/OT infrastructure that leverages all the features of Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Sentinel and SOC tools.
Supply chain optimization:
Allowing to know in real time the monitoring and control of equipment that control the status of orders, machinery, or stock, and in this way, optimize the product lifecycle.
Ex: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management integrates an IoT add-on to produce actionable information in various scenarios such as production delays, downtime, or product quality. In this way, it is possible to have metrics which allow to set quality standards in manufacturing.
Reduction of business costs:
One of the most remarkable particularities of IoT technology applied in its entirety to all the points mentioned above, is its ability to reduce operating costs thanks to the use of data analytics allowing a more efficient use of resources, predictive maintenance, and optimized decision making.
Now that we have seen some of the benefits and practical use cases, it is worth stating what the application of IoT 4.0 technology solutions can do for an organization by leveraging cloud resources ...
1. Boost your innovation
2. Improve productivity
3. Improve competitiveness in the sector
4. Improve its resilience
5. To shield their security
6. Automate your operations
7. Benefit from a much broader use of your sector.
Learn more...
Specifically, Microsoft Azure Industrial Internet of Things are a set of microservices in Azure, designed to meet the needs of industrial and manufacturing plants, providing the ability to integrate in the cloud all data and sensors collected on industrial equipment and devices for further management and analysis.
If you have any questions or would like to know more about how to work IoT in cloud environments, please do not hesitate to write to us and one of our agents will contact you to give you an answer according to your needs.