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4 March 2021
- Internet of Things
There are more and more IoT devices around us – in business and in our houses. IoT technology has to process a lot of data in order to operate though. Information gathered by devices can be useful for your business. Why is IoT data analytics important, and what are the best ways to handle it?
Access to IoT technology is growing, and many companies nowadays could benefit from implementing advanced IoT data analytics tools. There are plenty of devices that connect to the Internet and provide information that can be used to improve the efficiency of various business processes. Allow us to share with you what kind of industries can optimize their daily work using Internet of Things analytics.
Internet of Things – definition examples
So here we are – smart devices surround us, making our lives easier and businesses more efficient. The Internet of Things refers to numerous “things” (devices), which connect to the Internet and share data with other devices, systems and applications. Still, when someone mentions the IoT, most of us think about managing heating systems in an apartment or turning on the vacuum cleaner without being in the house, but this technology is already also being used in many industries in order to improve work efficiency.
Thanks to the IoT we can have smart factories in which technology monitors industrial machines in order to predict or prevent failures, reduce material waste and deal with other potential problems. Data gathered from IoT devices can be used to improve many companies’ productivity. Implementing IoT solutions means more than being innovative – it is a sign of a company’s maturity. Internet of Things is a part of our Data Science Consulting Services.
IoT analytics – why is data that devices collect important?
Internet of Things devices connect via the Internet, gain, process and share data. There are huge volumes of information that come from the industrial IoT and could be analysed to produce useful business insights. Special sensors on the machinery can collect various data. The benefits are similar to that of any data analytics. If production is a big part of your business, you should consider making IoT data an information subset of your big data analytics.
What is the biggest challenge of IoT analytics?
The IoT industry is getting bigger every year and the number of connected devices is growing rapidly. That means more data to collect and analyse. The problem is that datasets from IoT devices are rather complex and can be less structured than data of other origins. There is a great quantity of data to analyse – specific tools, systems and methods are required to turn collected information into useful insights for your company. Don’t forget that you will also need skilled IT experts for performing this kind of analytics.
What kind of business insights can you gain from IoT analytics?
Now, you know that IoT analytics is not simple, but why is it so important? Here are the reasons why you should think of implementing IoT analytics techniques and tools:
- Insights created on an IoT data basis can be used to reduce production expense and waste of materials, so – in general – the waste of money, time and other resources.
- IoT analytics provides you with the information necessary for product development.
- Collected data can help you improve the development process itself.
- With access to IoT data you can easily learn how your customers are using your products, which can actually be used not only while planning how to improve your product, but also in order to increase your clients’ satisfaction and gain additional information that can be used by your customer service.
- You can analyse data collected by a device to learn daily usage patterns among groups of your clients.
- IoT data can be used for predictive analytics to forecast future demand for the particular product, but also production costs and many other matters.
IoT analytics solutions – what should an IoT analytics tool be like?
If you are wondering what kind of IoT analytics software to choose, you need to learn about the main goal of such programs and what tasks they should perform. IoT analytics tools should help you understand what insights are hidden under the enormous amounts of structured and unstructured data collected by the connected devices.
How is IoT analytics software used? Data analysts use special tools to prepare IoT data for analytics. The proper tools for IoT analytics need to:
- consume information directly from IoT devices, sensors or a time series database,
- support data modeling, blending and discovery,
- produce high quality data visualization and reports from the data,
- offer a user the ability to drill down and up on data,
- use advanced technologies, like machine learning and Artificial intelligence,
- enable a user to work with real time and historical data.
With the proper IoT analytics tool, all of your employees should be able to get the answers to their business questions quickly and easily, without the help of experienced data scientists. Your new tool should come with a user-friendly interface Choosing the proper IoT analytics software and implementing it is the key to improving your company’s efficiency.
The list of IoT analytics software providers is long. Almost all well known IT companies on the market offer some kind of solution. There is, for example, the Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics tool, which can be integrated with the Azure IoT hub and the Azure IoT suite. All of those tools together are able to perform real time analytics for IoT sensor data. Amazon has its solution too – AWS IoT analytics is a type of managed service that automates most of the important tasks which have to be performed during IoT data analysis. Many users claim that this is the easiest to use platform for IoT analytics. The solutions of companies such as SAP or IBM should be mentioned as well. The SAP Analytics Cloud allows users to integrate IoT data with its analytical tools and IBM offers access to a platform that enables IoT data visualization and complex analysis. The choice is so big that you may find comparing those solutions quite difficult.
IoT analytics pricing – are managed services the right approach?
Every software house on the market has its own offer. There is no ideal solution for all companies. Each has its specific needs, expectations and, of course, budget for IoT analytics. The proper solution is the one that will fit your business needs best, although it can be difficult to find if you don’t have wide knowledge about IoT analytics yet.
There are basically two ways to handle the IoT analytics problem:
- using one of the available IoT data analytics services provided by all major Cloud players,
- developing customized IoT analytics for your company using similar tools, but managing them internally,
Fortunately, you don’t have to make this decision on your own. Our experienced consultants can learn your business needs and help you with choosing the right solution for your company. Remember that this is a very important decision. You can gain a lot useful business insights that will allow you to improve your products, services, the efficiency of your company, while reducing costs significantly and avoiding wasting money on solutions which will not be best suited for your business. Contact us if you need any advice on IoT analytics or any other advanced IT solution!
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