3 Criteria You Must Evaluate Your IoT Platform Against

While IoT implementation continues to gain popularity in most areas of business, the key to successful implementation lies in evaluating the IoT platform before trusting it completely.

The Vodafone IoT Spotlight Report (2020) identified that 84% of businesses claimed IoT was essential for their survival during the COVID-19 pandemic.

From household chores to complex industrial applications, IoT has transformed the way things used to function and has introduced a comfortable and intelligent way to work with technology. Looking at the progress of IoT, businesses have taken an interest in leveraging it in their processes. Many industries have successfully deployed IoT and have seen a positive return on investment. For instance, Coca Cola has harnessed the potential of IoT to enhance customer experience, loyalty, and marketing. Furthermore, the dream of smart cities is no more a dream now. A San Francisco based startup Compology that sells smart waste collection has come up with WasteOS. With the help of IoT cloud solution, Compology successfully reduces waste collection cost by 40%.

So, if you happen to be one of those leaders who are planning to implement IoT platform, here are three criteria that you must evaluated your IoT platform against:

1. Vendor Selection

The next step after you have decided to implement IoT in your organization is to choose the right vendor for executing your IoT objectives:

• Assess the business stability of the IoT provider by learning about her corporate background, use case experiences, and readily available capabilities against your requirements

• Evaluate ease of working with the supplier

• Learn about the technology standard the IoT provider adopts to see if there is sync between the provider’s approach and your IoT roadmap

• Gather information about the availability of alternatives to address supply and demand gaps if the need be.

2. Buy or Build an IoT Platform

• You need to carefully assess whether there is a need to develop an IoT platform from scratch or to buy an IoT platform that fulfills your current requirement:You must point out the critical requirements of your business and avoid spending time on assessing nonessential features

• IoT providers offer various modules to choose from, or you can customize the services according to your business needs

• Architectural requirement identification needs to be done to understand how you can get the best out of IoT platform implementation

• Examining the ROI of the existing IoT platforms will help you gauge the returns of your business before IoT implementation.

3. Disaster Management and Risk Management 

One cannot determine whether an infrastructure outage is underway, such incidences are highly unpredictable. The outage can be human-made or natural, but the consequences are punishing. Cloud is the most critical asset for IoT. Therefore, before implementing IoT in your organization, you must ask the cloud platform provider about:

• Cloud infrastructure capability to handle the data

• The frequency of data backup

• Private or shared cloud service

• Overall disaster recovery strategy

Business leaders are preparing themselves to get ahead in the race of technological developments with IoT. Therefore, evaluation of necessary criteria before execution to ensure a successful IoT implementation is a must.