Published on 08/06/2016 | Technology
The Internet of Things (IoT) as a concept is fascinating and exciting, but the key to gaining real business value from it, is effective communication between all elements of the architecture so you can deploy applications faster, process and analyze data at lightning speeds, and make decisions as soon as you can.
The IoT promises to bring the connectivity to an earthly level, permeating every home, vehicle, and workplace with smart, Internet-connected devices. But as dependence on our newly connected devices increases along with the benefits and uses of a maturing technology, the reliability of the gateways that make the IoT a functional reality must increase and make uptime a near guarantee. As every appliance, light, door, piece of clothing, and every other object in your home and office become potentially Internet-enabled; The Internet of Things is poised to apply major stresses to the current internet and data center infrastructure. Gartner predicts that the IoT may include 26 billion connected units by 2020.
The popular current approach is to centralize cloud data processing in a single site, resulting in lower costs and strong application security. But with the sheer amount of input data that will be received from globally distributed sources, this central processing structure will require backup. Also most enterprise data is pushed up to the cloud, stored and analyzed, after which a decision is made and action taken. But this system isn’t efficient, to make it efficient, there is a need to process some data or some big data in IoT case in a smart way, especially if it’s sensitive data and need quick action.
To illustrate the need for smart processing of some kind of data, IDC estimates that the amount of data analyzed on devices that are physically close to the Internet of Things is approaching 40 percent, which supports the urgent need for a different approach to this need.
To deal with this challenge, Fog Computing is the champion.
Fog computing allows computing, decision-making and action-taking to happen via IoT devices and only pushes relevant data to the cloud, Cisco coined the term “Fog computing “and gave a brilliant definition for Fog Computing: “The fog extends the cloud to be closer to the things that produce and act on IoT data. These devices, called fog nodes, can be deployed anywhere with a network connection: on a factory floor, on top of a power pole, alongside a railway track, in a vehicle, or on an oil rig. Any device with computing, storage, and network connectivity can be a fog node. Examples include industrial controllers, switches, routers, embedded servers, and video surveillance cameras.”
To understand Fog computing concept, the following actions define fog computing:
- Analyzes the most time-sensitive data at the network edge, close to where it is generated instead of sending vast amounts of IoT data to the cloud.
- Acts on IoT data in milliseconds, based on policy.
- Sends selected data to the cloud for historical analysis and longer-term storage.
Source: Cisco
Fog computing, thought of as a “low to the ground” extension of the cloud to nearby gateways, and proficiently provides for this need. As Gartner’s Networking Analyst, Joe Skorupa puts it: “The enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity and structure of IoT data, creates challenges, particularly in the areas of security, data, storage management, servers and the data center network with real-time business processes at stake. Data center managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management in these areas to be able to proactively meet the business priorities associated with IoT.”
For data handling and backhaul issues that shadow the IoT’s future, fog computing offers a functional solution. Networking equipment vendors proposing such a framework, envisions the use of routers with industrial-strength reliability, running a combination of open Linux and JVM platforms embedded with vendor’s own proprietary OS. By using open platforms, applications could be ported to IT infrastructure using a programming environment that’s familiar and supported by multiple vendors. In this way, smart edge gateways can either handle or intelligently redirect the millions of tasks coming from the myriad sensors and monitors of the IoT, transmitting only summary and exception data to the cloud proper.
