Return to overview

The 7 Industrial IoT Pillars: What Next?

We Discussed The Core Principals That Make Up A Complete IIoT Platform

Congratulations for making it this far in the 7 IIoT pillars! We hope we piqued your interest in all things IoT in the industrial world, and have given you the tools and insight to dig deeper into how IoT could benefit your organisation and use case.

Gartner developed a Magic Quadrant for Industrial Internet of Things vendor companies, to assess them on various facets of IoT. The seven categories were device management, application enablement & management, digital twins, integrations, security & compliance, data management and advanced analytics. All of these combined make up the foundations of an IoT platform. Davra has scored highly on the magic quadrant in both 2019 and 2020, and we are aiming for even higher in 2021.

Device management follows the flow of provisioning and authentication, configuration and control, and monitoring and diagnostics. When devices are installed onto the network, don’t just forget about them. Upgrades and software resetting need to be aligned with the overall IoT strategy to ensure device and network safety. Remember, what your devices monitor is what will be bringing data into your system; make sure you’re monitoring the correct assets!

Application enablement and development involves building out the core software needed to take your use case and present it in a way that’s easy to understand for your users. With the Davra platform, we have built up a core set of use cases that we know work, and can then tweak and customise them to meet your unique needs.

Digital twins make up the third pillar and are a virtual replica of a physical asset. What-if statements can be used to figure out how the asset would operate in material circumstances and can save a lot of time and money over physically deploying and testing.

The integrations component of the IoT platform does what it says on the box; it takes your end-to-end business applications and consolidates them all onto one system. An IoT system should be able to interact with a legacy system and enhancing the capabilities of your business using what you already have.

Security in any organisational IT setting is always a big concern. Having a set of policies in place that are strictly adhered to is a necessity. Compliance and practices involving prevention, detection and correction of any security breaches must be compiled in any IoT system, or it could be defunct before it even begins to draw any data.

Data management encompasses all areas of the data flowing into and out of the system. From the data security through to the networking and data-driven decisions, when the IoT platform is being developed, we ensure organisational data siloes are opened up to derive maximum benefit from the system.

Advanced Analytics is probably the area people get most excited about, and with good reason. Analytics is carried out on the data to give it meaning and context. Without analytics, the data is just sitting there in a database without any action surrounding the processing. Data enables end-users to make better decisions or act upon a severe alert in the system. There’s a multitude of ways analytics can be implemented in the system, from machine learning to event stream processing.

It might seem like a lot to take in, on top of all the procedures and solutions management every organisation needs to assess daily. But with IIoT comes operational transparency and end-to-end supply chain visibility. Throughout our pillar discussions, we mentioned the importance of worker safety in harsh industrial IoT settings; with an IoT strategy, workers can rest assured that their conditions are being closely monitored. Managing a plant’s equipment saves costs as well as unnecessary downtime, increasing overall operational effectiveness.

Most importantly, IoT enables you to keep up with increasing customer demands. Failing to meet their needs could result in an organisation losing out to agile competitors. With the development of new robots comes the demand for new complex tasks, with IIoT and bidirectional conversational channels, these updates can be quickly made to robots.

We frequently mentioned throughout the pillar blog posts that every use case is unique to the organisation. Still, without knowing what you want to derive from an IoT platform, you may end up going down a difficult path. But fear not! With this knowledge, you can now map your organisational goals and processes and keep in mind how IoT can sit atop these workflows.

These pillars were designed to allow you to assess your company from the ground up, while also figuring out the various complexities of an IoT platform. Yes, it may seem complicated, but that’s where a well-established team like Davra comes into play. With our expertise and array of knowledge in the heavy industries, we’ve developed our skills and crafted use cases that work time and again with our customers. With the Davra platform plugged in, you can rest assured that all the wheels are turning in unison, and you’ll be alerted about any problems before you can shout Industry 4.0!

We’d love to hear your thoughts about the IIoT pillar series, and how you think IoT can impact your industry or organisation. Although we’ve been around since 2012 when IoT was just burgeoning, we’re growing every day. We love discussing the sheer size and impact IoT can have on just about any organisation. Please book in a demo on our platform if you think we can take your organisation to new and more extraordinary realms. For more information, please contact us.