Solution
IoT and Digital Engineering
Bringing Together IoT and Digital Engineering to Create Rich Experiences
Highlights
- Advancement in IOT devices and IOT platforms is reducing the relevance of the solutions for the current business needs.
- Comprehensive assessment helps identify business needs and shapes the path for modernization.
- Modernization of IOT assets and platforms is essential for businesses to stay competitive and maximize value from their solutions.
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Lead with IOT
The Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping industries—from monitoring energy storage assets in the Mojave Desert to managing critical assets onboard carrier vessels across oceans, to monitor the installed base of wood processing integrated machinery, and orchestrating data from diverse public transport ecosystem. As early adopters of IOT platforms and solutions, these organizations benefitted from real-time visibility, predictive maintenance and improved operational awareness. However, with technological evolution, these organizations find themselves constrained by legacy IOT platforms that are rigid, siloed, and incapable of scaling or adapting. This limitation prevents them from realizing efficiency improvements through real-time analytics, AI-driven process automation, personalized customer experiences through data-driven insights, digital twins and simulation, and new revenue channels through servitization and data monetization.
This technological inertia not only hampers integration of new devices and sensors but also delays feature rollouts, weakens security posture, and diminishes business competitiveness.
Legacy IOT platform hurdles
Below are the key challenges of legacy IoT platforms, based on recent customer interactions and engagements
- Inflexibility: These platforms often rely on rigid architectures, limiting their ability to seamlessly integrate new devices, sensors, or technologies. This constraint slows down feature deployment and undermines business agility and competitiveness.
- Scalability issues: As IoT ecosystems scale, legacy platforms often buckle under the pressure of growing data volumes—resulting in performance bottlenecks, unexpected downtime, and delays in onboarding new sites. These limitations directly translate to lost revenue opportunities and diminished customer satisfaction.
- Self-signed certificates: Use of self-signed certificates in production deployment pose significant security and operational risks including trust issues, vulnerability to attack, lack of revocation, asset visibility and tracking challenges, device communication failures and manual lifecycle handling which is error prone and infeasible for large scale IoT.
- Security vulnerabilities: Legacy IoT platforms often lack advanced security capabilities, leaving industries vulnerable to cyber threats and data breaches. These gaps not only increase the risk exposure but also drive-up operational costs due to frequent patching and device firmware upgrades.
- Lack of interoperability: These platforms transfer aggregated asset data as file which creates an operational overhead for processing. They fall short in integrating with external systems, creating silos that obstruct seamless data exchange and advanced analytics. This disconnect limits the ability to unlock new revenue streams through data-driven insights and strategic decision-making.
- Multi-vendor device/assets: Managing multi-vendor devices and assets introduces a host of challenges—including interoperability, device lifecycle management, data harmonisation, security enforcement, and lack of standardisation. These complexities significantly drive-up maintenance overhead and operational costs.
Evaluation rubric
By embracing modern IoT solutions and platforms, businesses can not only resolve challenges but also unlock new opportunities for growth, innovation, and competitiveness. Whether it's optimizing operations, improving customer experiences, or creating new revenue streams, IoT has the potential to revolutionize industries and transform the future.
When evaluating an IoT platform, the following key parameters must be considered:
- OT asset/device management: The platform’s support to provision, connect, monitor, manage, and control heterogeneous devices/assets, along with automated device discovery through connectors.
- IT-OT convergence: Data acquisition through industry-standard protocols like OPC/UA, MQTT, ONVIF, and vendor-specific protocols. Flexibility to gather data from heterogeneous devices through protocol conversion, data filtration, data ingestion at the edge, and edge analytics. Support for industry-standard protocols to transfer the data to enterprise IT.
- Digital twin, simulation, and advanced analytics: Support to create the digital replica/twin of the physical assets and enhanced visualization of the digital twin using AR/VR. Integration of the digital twin with simulation tools to identify optimization opportunities that are normally too complex to find just by monitoring the digital twin. Advanced analytics and visualization to derive insights from the data.
- Performance and scalability: The platform's ability to handle increasing data volumes and device connections efficiently.
- Operational efficiency: Ease of use of the platform for IT and OT administrators, along with utilities like device simulators and synthetic telemetry data generators. Availability of Low-code-no-code (LCNC) platform for rapid IOT application development.
- Reliability: The platform's ability to prevent and quickly recover from device, connectivity, and service failure.
- Security: Robust security features offered by the platform for device, certificate management, edge, data, and connection.
- Integration and compatibility: The platform should integrate with existing systems like ERP, CRM, and MES. Device, service, and management SDKs and APIs should be available for custom development.
- Total cost of ownership (TCO): Total costs associated with the platform, including licensing, maintenance, and support.
- Platform vendor capabilities: Vendor's roadmap and vision for the IOT platform, vendor reputation, community and ecosystem, documentation, and resources.
Innovate with IOT
To overcome the limitations of legacy IoT infrastructures, organisations should:
- Upgrade to smart devices: Where feasible, prioritize upgrading to smart assets/devices. For legacy assets/devices that must be retained, gateways or protocol adapters could ensure compatibility. Subsequently, the OT landscape will be redesigned to ensure full compliance and alignment with established industry standards such as ISA 95, ISA 62443, and CPwE. This enhances interoperability, reduces vulnerabilities, and improves overall system responsiveness.
- Adopt cloud-native or advanced IoT platforms: Transition to scalable, secure, and reliable platforms that offer comprehensive capabilities such as device lifecycle management, real-time data ingestion, edge processing, and advanced analytics. Integration with simulation tools enables process modelling and optimisation, driving operational excellence and innovation.
- Architecture governance: Implementing robust governance practices will ensure that IoT modernization efforts yield tangible business benefits.
Future-proof IOT now
Modernizing the IoT platform is no longer optional—it's imperative. Effective IoT modernization requires careful planning, assessment, and execution to ensure a smooth transition and maximize benefits. Modernization is the key to improving efficiency and productivity, enhancing security and compliance, gaining valuable insights from data, reducing costs and complexity, and driving innovation and competitiveness.