The role of the cloud in IoT systems
Without the cloud, IoT edge devices would have limited usefulness. The cloud enables system owners to collect and transform data into intelligence. Cloud services provide the brains for robotic systems; they provide machine learning tools to aid in decision-making for complex systems, and they store the data collected at the edge.
The cloud even provides cybersecurity services for edge devices, from provisioning of identities and certificates to monitoring for anomalies in operations.
The following diagram is a genericized virtual private cloud that offers basic functional and security services to protect device-to-device data transactions. It shows typical, virtualized services available for general IT as well as for IoT-enabled deployments:
Not all IoT deployers will need to make use of all the cloud capabilities available, but most will require a minimal cross-section of services, and require them to be well-protected.
