White Paper

Industrial Transformation Through the Internet of Things

Sponsored by: Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Stacy Crook
September 2018

The Industrial IoT Opportunity

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a natural evolution of the current technological and cultural environment
that will impact almost every industry and country around the world. IDC tracks IoT spending by
organizations, governments, and consumers on a biannual basis and finds that the market momentum
has been sustained year over year as stakeholders continue to invest in connected products and
solutions. One of the most interesting opportunities in this space is the industrial Internet of Things
(IIoT). IDC predicts that IoT spending within industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, and energy
will grow to $398 billion in 2022, representing 33% of all IoT spending worldwide.

In the IIoT, organizations can gather data from various types of industrial equipment, sensors in the
field measuring ambient conditions, connected safety equipment, and vehicles and apply analytics to
that data to understand how those assets are performing in real time and how they may perform in the
future. According to IDC research, the top factor that influenced industrial companies to create a
strategy or investment in IoT was the ability to improve business productivity and efficiency internally.
The second-most-important reason was to improve operational costs. While these results demonstrate
that IoT adoption is primarily being driven by the ability to create internal improvements, the impact of
these benefits to the customer is also top of mind; improving productivity and efficiency for customers
was the third-most-popular reason industrial organizations deploy IoT strategies. Other key drivers
cited in the survey were improving maintenance costs internally and externally, process automation,
and the ability to create new revenue streams.

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Challenges to Industrial IoT Deployments
IDC research finds vertical industries that participate in the industrial IoT, such as manufacturing, and
utilities represent some of the largest opportunities for IoT spending. In fact, some of these industries
have been leveraging various forms of legacy machine-to-machine technology for many years.
However, the growing pressure to cut costs and create competitive differentiation is forcing even the
most staid industries to evolve their current enterprise architectures to take advantage of modern
technologies such as cloud, big data and analytics, mobile, and social, dubbed the 3rd Platform by
IDC. These four technologies are important foundational elements in a digital enterprise that can help
organizations successfully adapt to a new, digital transformation–focused economy. Such investments
are relevant to IoT strategy as present-day IoT solutions often depend on or interact with these
technologies. However, beyond the willingness to adopt new technology architectures that can
properly support the size and scale of IoT deployments, there are also a specific set of challenges
industrial firms must consider as they begin (or evolve) their IoT journeys. In detail:

▪ Security: In IDC's research, security comes up as the top inhibitor to IoT projects year after
year. IoT security considerations encompass the IoT endpoint, the network the data travels
over, and the server environment where the IoT data will be processed, analyzed, and stored,
which could be an edge device or a centralized datacenter (on-premise or the cloud). The
objective of IoT security is to apply the appropriate controls to the device and/or a segmented
"network of things" ecosystem that ensures the desired level of protection for:
▪ Confidentiality: To protect sensor-based data from being disclosed to unauthorized entities
or individuals
▪ Integrity: To validate sensor-based data and protect it from being manipulated or
identifying changes as it is accessed and/or transmitted over time
▪ Availability: To allow the intended use of sensor-based data for productivity and other
purposes
Security challenges arise from the heterogeneity, geographic distribution, and long life spans
of IoT devices. In the industrial setting, an IoT device could be a sensor, a machine, or a
gateway, each with its own computing capabilities and security requirements. Adding to this
complexity is the fact that some of these devices were not built with security in mind and are
easy targets for hackers due to their lack of basic encryption or authentication mechanisms.
Beyond the heterogeneous nature of the devices, lack of visibility into device fleets represents
another key security challenge. If an organization isn't aware of all the devices connecting to
the network, it is impossible for them to protect against possible vulnerabilities stemming from
those endpoints. Given that many IoT devices will be active much longer than the average
laptop or mobile device, these endpoints can represent long-lasting threats if not properly
managed and secured. Organizations must also consider how they protect data in motion and
at rest.
▪ Data access and preparation: The value of implementing IoT technology in an industrial
setting is to leverage IoT data for business value. However, organizations need to access the
data, and then prepare it for analytics before they will be able to achieve valuable insights.
Industrial equipment may not transmit electronic data at all, or if it does, it may communicate in
any one of a large variety of protocols. The data may be coming over a spotty connection,
leading to gaps in data collection. In addition, the telemetry coming off the machine may need
to be combined with other contextual data feeds like time or location to give it meaning. These
challenges require developers to spend significant time building custom logic into their
applications to clean false readings, fill in gaps in data, and enrich it with contextual
information.

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 ▪ Distributed architectures: For many industrial companies, relying solely on cloud technology
for IoT is not realistic. For instance, if a manufacturer can get insight into the fact that a
machine is about to fail in real time, it can stop the machine before it starts producing flawed
products. In an oil rig, there may be intermittent connectivity to the internet, and faulty
machinery can cause human harm so it's critical to be able to run those analytics in offline
mode. IDC's research backs this up, where the majority of industrial companies do plan to
process some portion of their data at the point of creation, and then send some other portion of
the data to a centralized datacenter for processing. Another benefit of this hybrid data
processing model is that it helps avoid network upgrades that might have been required to
send massive amounts of IoT data to the cloud. Therefore, organizations should consider how
they can build IoT applications that can run in distributed computing models and, in some
cases, withstand intermittent connectivity. This computing model could encompass multiple
tiers and be quite complex, depending on the required network architecture.
▪ Cost and downtime: Beyond the technical challenges of IoT, there is a whole other set of
deployment challenges that exist in the business realm. An IoT inhibitor that ranks high on the
list of industrial organizations is cost. In industries facing economic headwinds, or tight
margins, it can be difficult to justify spend on new technologies. While IoT deployments could
create cost savings in the long term, it is not always easy to make the leap of faith in the short
term. Concern about downtime is another consideration for industrial companies. There are
huge risks if a production line goes down such as lost revenue and missed daily quotas.
Industrial manufacturers, suppliers to industrial manufacturers, and end users all worry that
productivity can be impacted by new technologies and technology paradigms.
▪ Skills gaps and organizational change: Skills shortages represent another stumbling block.
Once IoT data is gathered (which often requires cloud architectures not often on the payroll at
industrial companies), it takes an understanding of data science to create algorithmic models
that will bear the most meaningful insights from the data. People with strong data science skills
are in high demand, and command high salaries, which can make acquiring such employees
difficult. In addition, many of the newer IoT technologies are cloud based, requiring knowledge
of web development languages to build an application. On the other hand, connecting
industrial assets to the cloud requires a knowledge of embedded device application
development, which is a completely different skill set. Often the web development skills sit in
IT, and the embedded development skills sit in the operational technology staff. In the past,
these groups may have had little need to communicate. With an IoT deployment, data
originating from operational technology will now feed into and integrate with information
technology (IT) systems. This means these two groups now have to have a much tighter and
cooperative relationship than in days past. These organizational changes can be difficult to
navigate.

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Recommended Strategies for Successful Industrial IoT Deployments
As outlined previously, IoT projects are complex undertakings with many potential stumbling blocks,
even for industries that have experience under their belt. In the sections that follow, IDC details some
of our key recommendations to help put an IoT project on a path toward success.

Business Strategy
▪ Tie the IoT strategy to digital transformation: The first step any organization should take in its IoT
journey is to consider how using IoT technology can contribute to business goals. Today, the
majority of organizations IDC talks to are undergoing some type of digital transformation. IDC's
definition of digital transformation is simply the ability to transform decision making with technology.
IoT deployments can provide a key source of the data that will be used to make those decisions, so
it only makes sense that the IoT projects should align with the goals of the digital transformation. In
the industrial world, the organizations surveyed by IDC are most interested in using this data to
improve internal efficiencies, reduce operational costs, improve productivity for customers, and
reduce internal maintenance costs. While an organization may be able to imagine many uses for
its IoT data, IDC recommends organizations choose one use case to get started with and adopt
larger scale and additional projects only after some initial lessons have been learned.
▪ Executive leadership: IDC has found that one of the common factors of successful IoT projects
have been when there has been an executive sponsor in place. Leadership at the top of the
organization is important for a few reasons. First, this person can help ensure that the goals of
the project are aligned with the strategic goals of the business. This alignment can help ensure
the project receives the proper funding. Second, successful IoT initiatives require collaboration
among multiple groups. An executive sponsor that believes there is value in the project can
head up an IoT center of excellence (COE) and encourage cross-functional collaboration
among the groups participating in the COE. One of the key goals for an IIoT COE can be to
foster an open dialogue between operational technology and information technology staff.
While these groups may have lived in relatively separate worlds in the past, the ability to truly
harness the power of IoT increasingly requires operational data to be integrated with data
living in IT systems. For instance, if IoT data reveals that a machine is about to fail, a service
ticket could be triggered in a field service system.
▪ Establish metrics: Executives should create critical success factors (CSFs) that focus on the
delivery of business outcomes while mitigating the risk of failure. For example, if an
organization is deploying a predictive quality solution that leverages IoT data, the organization
might want to measure how the timeliness and quantity and quality of goods shipped on a
daily basis changes from before to after the solution is deployed. The organization could also
measure how fewer product recalls leads to increased revenue and customer satisfaction. If
an organization is deploying a predictive maintenance use case, the organization might
choose to measure how much money it has saved by performing maintenance only on those
machines that really need it versus performing maintenance on the manufacturer's
recommended schedule.
▪ Consider how IoT could change your role in the value chain: With IoT sensors and information
generated at every location where a sensor is connected, the business will evolve as an
organization transforms into a digital entity. Currently, businesses that make and sell products
to their customers stay in business because they invest heavily in their value chain. However,
today we see a shift in how lines of businesses are engaging with their customers. Customers
need to be at the center of their business strategy rather than at the end of the value chain.
The outcome of this is that the current product-based value chains will lose their relevance
over time. In response, businesses have been steadily making the transformation from selling

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 just products to now selling a mixture of both products and services. For example, companies
that manufacture air compressors are increasingly moving from selling the physical asset to
compressed air as a service. The business value model is now based on agility as the
competitive advantage is centered around the ability to spin-up (or down) services that the
customer now consumes. As more and more data is available to both the customer and the
lines of business, the value model becomes one based on the network value of a very broad
ecosystem, a phenomenon IDC refers to as multiplied innovation. This complex business
model is very much driven by open, collaborative, and integrated business partners and rules.
Industrial organizations need to consider how their overall technology strategy needs to evolve
to support this new reality, given the high levels of security that must be maintained within
critical infrastructure and on factory floors.
▪ Evolving your workforce: Because many IoT technologies are still emerging, and the projects
require a complex mix of hardware, software, and services technology to implement (across
OT and IT domains), it is common for organizations to experience a skills shortage in this
space. Companies must decide how they will solve this issue, either by training their existing
workforce, hiring new talent in-house, or outsourcing components of the project to third parties.
When making this decision, we suggest the organization consider what pieces of the project
are critical to have in-house and let third parties handle any tasks which will not add any
competitive differentiation or value to your enterprise. For those tasks that are kept in-house
but will require updated approaches, it is worthwhile to spend time educating employees on
why those changes are being implemented and how adopting the new approach will benefit
them in the long run. The most difficult part of digital transformation is organizational change
management. If that can be dealt with effectively, the technology adoption process tends to
also go much smoother.
▪ Consider various employee roles: IoT applications in industrial environments should have
entry points for different roles since it takes different skill sets to ensure organizations get the
most out of IoT projects. Operations analysts need dashboards and the ability to run ad hoc
analysis and queries on data. Their job is to investigate and analyze IoT data and build
models. Next, fleet managers keep all devices updated and running smoothly while minimizing
the risk of bricking devices. They need to keep the fleet current with firmware via over-the-air
updates. Industrial engineers ensure that the company's production and process goals are on
schedule and are skilled in operations technology but often less so with cloud architectures.
These are just some of the key roles that should be considered when choosing technology for
an industrial IoT deployment.
Technology Strategy
▪ Device connectivity and management: One of the complexities of IoT is that there are a wide
variety of device types from which you might want to gather data. These endpoints can include
anything from a microcontroller up to a robot, have varying amounts of processing power and
storage, and speak in a variety of communication protocols. Historically, there have been a
wide variety of protocols used in industrial environments for things like machine automation,
control, and meter readings. Protocol types and families such as Fieldbus, Modbus, and OPC
UA are some of the most popular within traditional wired networks, although wireless
connectivity is increasingly being considered as well. Because devices that speak different
protocols cannot natively speak to each other (or oftentimes, to the web), data from different
devices and different protocols needs to be translated in a centralized device (like a gateway)
so organizations can collect and compile data from all over a facility — and use that data to
gather insights.

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 Secure network connectivity must also be considered. Oftentimes, factory environments are
firewalled off from IT networks in the company. However, you may want to start sending device
telemetry to analytics services that reside in IT networks. Therefore, one of the first steps in an
IoT project is to understand which IoT endpoints you need to connect to, figure out how you
can most quickly get access to the data in those machines (such as an SDK), and then how
you will securely move that data into the network where it will be analyzed.
Once devices are connected, there needs to be tools to scale fleets and organize, monitor,
and remotely manage devices at scale. You should also be able to remotely update the
software running on devices after the device has been deployed in the field — ensuring that
devices are always running on the latest software and also remotely execute actions on the
devices such as reboots, factory resets, and security patches.
▪ Edge computing: Previously, we discussed the fact that most industrial organizations will
engage in distributed computing models that include at least three tiers: IoT endpoints, an
intermediary processing device, such as a gateway, and a back-end datacenter. The
endpoints generate the data; the intermediate devices aggregate, process, analyze, and route
data to the back end (and/or send commands back to the endpoint as needed); and the back
end ingests, processes, stores, and analyzes data. One of the first considerations will be how
to create an architecture where legacy devices can be easily onboarded to cloud-connected
gateways and information can seamlessly flow back and forth across these three tiers. Then,
the next step is to consider your individual environment and the potential complexities of
running IoT applications within it. For instance, will your application be running in an
environment with intermittent connectivity to the internet? If so, you'll need your applications to
be able to execute in offline mode. When connectivity is restored, they will need to
automatically sync data, as well as fetch new code and any new analytic models.
▪ Cloud infrastructure: While computing on the edge is critical in many IIoT deployments, the
cloud component of the architecture also plays an important role. The cloud provides scale,
from both a data management and device management perspective. We'll dive more into
those requirements in the sections that follow. It also provides a global backbone from which
to gather and analyze data. For instance, you may start your deployment in the United States,
but when you're ready to expand to another region, you can quickly deploy to another region
supported by a cloud provider and be able to see all devices under one pane of glass. Today,
the heavy compute requirements to train advanced analytics models are also best served by
large datacenters. Once those models are built, they can then be deployed on edge devices.
Finally, cloud providers are offering new application deployment paradigms with utility for IoT,
such as containers and serverless computing. Containers offer portability and improved
DevOps capabilities, which can help dealing with the complexity of IoT endpoints; serverless
computing allows organizations to deploy applications in an event-driven way, which is useful
for cost savings and scale.
▪ Data infrastructure: From a data perspective, organizations have to consider how they will
ingest large amounts of data; how they will clean, transform, aggregate, and enrich data; how
they will analyze data; and how they will store it. In detail:
▪ Data ingestion: The elastic nature of the cloud is useful for high-scale data ingestion and is
also a benefit as workloads scale up and down over time or at certain points of the year.
For example, a transportation and logistics provider will need to process significantly more
data in the holiday season than the rest of the year; the cloud gives them the flexibility to
temporarily spin up additional compute as needed during these peak times.

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 ▪ Data preparation and integration: To use IoT data for analytics, organizations must
consider what kinds of data preparation tasks they will perform and where those tasks
should take place. One of the first issues that has to be considered is data hygiene. IoT
data can be inconsistent due to environmental issues such as intermittent connectivity and
noisy due to the types of data transmitted. In addition, because many IoT devices do not
natively speak the language of the web, raw telemetry may need to be translated from one
communication protocol to another to reach the internet — and for storage, from one data
model to another. Some of these data preparation and integration tasks may need to take
place on the edge, and others might take place in the cloud. In addition to where the data
is integrated, another consideration is what other data needs to be combined with the raw
telemetry to gather meaningful insights from it. For example, farmers might want to
combine weather information with the IoT data they are gathering from their soil (moisture
levels, etc.) — and they might also want to combine data from one field with data from
another field to get an aggregated view of performance across all fields.
▪ Data management: As mentioned previously, IoT data has specific characteristics, and
this translates into the need for a different approach to data management than a traditional
system of record might require. It is also important to note that an organization may need
different data storage mechanisms for data that they want to gather real-time insights from
versus data that they want to store in batches to perform historical analysis on. One
approach with high relevance for IoT is time series data, which can be used for real-time
alerts or historical data analysis. In addition, the volume and unstructured nature of IoT
data makes it a good match for NoSQL-based databases.
▪ Analytics: The end goal of IoT deployments is to gather meaningful insights from the data
collected and to take actions on those insights. Analytics tend to take several forms:
descriptive analytics, where a company describes what has happened; diagnostic
analytics, where a company can understand why that event took place; predictive
analytics, where a company can predict the set of conditions that will lead to that event
happening; and prescriptive analytics, where a company is given a prescription of what
action to take to eliminate a future problem. Each of these analytics builds on top of one
another and require increasingly sophisticated tools to help organizations reach their goal.
For instance, descriptive analytics only require a dashboard, whereas predictive and
prescriptive analytics require advanced analytic tools, like machine learning (ML). It is
important to understand the kinds of data your organization needs — and how people need
to be able to visualize that data — to meet your goals when choosing analytic tools.
Organizations also need to understand what skills are required to work with those tools.
▪ Advanced analytics: As mentioned previously, certain types of analytics provide data on
the here and now — but much of the value in gathering IoT data is to prevent negative
events before they occur — and, in the future, use that data to become more prescriptive in
problem resolution. This requires a system to learn about the condition — or combination of
conditions — that might lead to the negative event happening, so when the system sees
that those conditions are present, it can predict that the negative event is going to happen.
But the machine learning process can be cumbersome, given the time it takes to develop
the right data set, figure out the right algorithms and tools, go through the training and
tuning process, and then operationalize those models. Organizations should explore what
tools are available to help them more easily build machine learning models and get them
ready for training. Key capabilities include the ability to easily connect to training data, help
with selecting and optimizing the best algorithm and framework for a given application,
and the ability to train and deploy the models at scale. Then once the models are trained,
they need to be deployed down to devices on factory floors or in the field. For example,

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 industrial companies can build a machine learning model to predict failure on
manufacturing equipment by analyzing sensor data like vibrations, temperature, and noise
level. Then the companies can deploy and run the model locally on the factory floor and
take relevant actions such as shutting off the power.
▪ Security and device management: As mentioned previously, the scale and heterogeneity of
IoT deployments create device management and security risks. It is important to be able to
understand how many devices are connecting to a network, the current state of those devices
(are they online, offline, etc.), and the software those devices are running. Outdated firmware
or software on the endpoint can present a security vulnerability and thus the ability to keep it
up to date lowers risk. Companies also need to be able to authenticate those devices so that
when a device is trying to connect to a network, they know it is a trusted device. IDC believes
that hardware-based security is optimal for embedded devices, so we recommend asking
potential IoT technology providers how they are working with chipset vendors to enable
hardware-based authentication and encryption.
When considering an IoT deployment, organizations must think carefully about how this
initiative may open up new vulnerabilities across the network. When considering data access
and transport, it is important to use secure communications protocols with built-in encryption.
IoT projects can also pose the risk of physical harm as critical infrastructure is increasingly run
on embedded systems. In the near future, such systems will also be responsible for the
physical transport of humans. Because there are many different types of IoT projects, the
specific security and privacy concerns may vary by deployment type.
For instance, if we consider an industrial IoT deployment where the organization plans to
integrate machine data on a factory floor with a back-end ERP system, the machine itself can
pose a security threat as the company has now opened up a communication tunnel between
that machine and its corporate network. A company that produces consumer goods such as a
connected car or a connected appliance must consider the risks that these devices pose to
their customers from a physical security and privacy perspective. From a compliance
standpoint, each of these companies must determine how they will properly manage and store
this data on a global basis.

AWS as a Provider of IoT Solutions

Founded in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a global provider of cloud services. The company's
services span the infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service layers of the cloud computing
stack, including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools,
management tools, IoT, and security. The AWS Cloud operates 55 Availability Zones within 18
geographic regions, and 1 local region, around the world.

AWS IoT's goal is to make sure industrial customers know the state of every thing and can reason on
top of that data to solve business problems. AWS aims to help industrial customers increase
operational efficiency, create net-new revenue streams, and make industrial equipment, processes,
and customers smarter. The company does this by offering services that enable companies of any size
to reason on top of industrial operation data using machine learning models for predictive
maintenance, quality, and safety. Since customers are at various stages of their IoT journey, AWS
provides these capabilities as a set of discrete services so customers have the flexibility to procure
functionality as it is needed.

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AWS launched its first IoT service in 2015; it has since then broadened out its portfolio significantly to
include the following products and web services:

▪ Amazon FreeRTOS is an operating system for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power
edge devices easier to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. Amazon FreeRTOS
securely connects small, low-power devices to more powerful edge devices or to the cloud.
▪ AWS Greengrass is software that lets customers run local compute, messaging, data caching,
sync, and ML inference capabilities for connected devices in a secure way. It essentially
extends AWS to the edge so that connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions, keep
device data in sync, and communicate with other devices — even when not connected to the
internet. AWS Greengrass ML Inference is a feature of Greengrass that allows customers to
take machine learning models that were built and trained in the cloud and then deploy and run
them locally on devices.
▪ AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud platform that allows connected devices to securely interact
with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT Core supports high-scale IoT message
processing and can route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and
securely. It also provides device shadows so applications can keep track of and communicate
with devices even when they aren't connected.
▪ AWS IoT Device Management helps companies securely onboard, organize, and monitor and
remotely manage IoT devices at scale.
▪ AWS IoT Device Defender provides a fully managed service that audits the security policies
associated with devices and continuously monitors devices for behavior that deviates from the
appropriate behavior defined for each device.
▪ AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service that helps customers run sophisticated analytics
on large volumes of IoT data without having to worry about the cost and complexity typically
required to build an IoT analytics platform. It filters, transforms, and enriches IoT data before
storing it in a time series data store for querying and analysis. You can then use prebuilt machine
learning models for common IoT use cases. With AWS IoT Analytics, you can get business
insights from machine learning without having to build your own IoT analytics platform.
▪ AWS IoT 1-Click is a service that enables simple devices to trigger AWS Lambda functions
that can execute an action. While these services are horizontal in nature, AWS is highly
focused on their application in the IIoT.
A few sample use cases are as follows:

▪ Predictive maintenance — avoid downtime and optimize supply chain: Predictive maintenance
analytics captures the state of industrial equipment so organizations can identify potential
breakdowns before they impact production. AWS helps customers continuously monitor and
infer equipment status, health, and performance to detect issues in real time. Knowing when
equipment needs attention helps companies plan maintenance work, keep the right inventory
of spare parts, and avoid unplanned outages.
▪ Predictive quality — improve the quality of factory output: Predictive quality analytics extracts
actionable insights from industrial data sources such as manufacturing equipment,
environmental conditions, and human observations. AWS provides services that allow
industrial companies to build predictive quality models using data from all the devices on their
factory floors such as rotors, valves, conveyors, and robotics. As a result, they can quickly spot
quality issues before they cascade down the production process for improved yield and
minimized scrap.

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 ▪ Asset condition monitoring — maximize asset utilization and performance: Asset condition
monitoring captures the state of machines, equipment, and safety wearables so organizations
can understand how the asset is performing in the field or on the factory floor. AWS helps
customers capture all IoT data and monitor performance and health of equipment, workers,
machines, and vehicles. With increased visibility into their assets, companies can maximize
asset utilization, fully exploit their investment in machines and equipment, and keep people safe.

Conclusion
The industrial Internet of Things offers the ability to transform a company based on a better
understanding of the assets used to run that business in real time. Organizations can leverage IoT
data to get ahead of potential issues that cost time, money, and reputational damage. However,
industrial environments often have unique characteristics, such as intermittent connectivity, that can
create complexity in solution deployment.

A successful industrial IoT deployment requires consideration from both a business and a technology
strategy point of view. It is important to make sure that the IoT strategy is well integrated with the overall
digital transformation strategy to ensure that the goals and metrics established for each initiative are well
aligned. It is also critical to understand how your IoT deployment may change your role in your current
value chain, and how you will need to interact with partners and customers in this new world. Once the
proper vision for the project is established, choosing technology becomes much easier.

The technology strategy for industrial IoT should include capabilities that allow your organization to
connect, secure, and manage devices — and ingest, prepare, manage, and analyze data — at scale.
Oftentimes, the low latency and security required in industrial environments will create the need for a
hybrid strategy that includes both edge and cloud compute, so a platform that can support this
continuum is ideal. Finally, the end goal of most IoT deployments is to gain actionable insights from
data. Tools that can help you get to those insights faster can make a significant difference in gaining
competitive advantage.

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About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory
services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology
markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-
based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts
provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in
over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients
achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology
media, research, and events company.

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