A Brief Introduction To Azure IoT Platform

Internet of Things or IoT as we know it is rapidly growing in popularity. People are starting to understand the potential and significance of this new-flanged technology and there has been a tremendous rise in the demand of IoT services. This increasing demand has urged many startups and tech giants to come forth with all sorts of IoT solutions. The list includes some prominent names like IBM, Infosys, Wipro, Microsoft and Cisco.

Like many of its competitors, Microsoft has built a whole new platform for its IoT solutions which is known as the Azure IoT Hub. Through this blog, I’m going to give you a brief overview of what Azure IoT platform is and how it helps the developers and various businesses.  

Also read How IoT Influences The Manufacturing Process.

What Is Azure IoT Platform?

Azure IoT is an end-to-end platform that provides comprehensive IoT solutions to various industries and enterprises for streamlining their business processes. As a matter of fact, the IoT solutions offered by Microsoft Azure are broadly divided into two categories. These are Azure IoT Suite and Azure IoT Hub. The Former is a complete package of all the IoT services with custom extensions while the latter is mainly used for rendering device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device messaging capabilities. The IoT suite is generally used by the developers for building custom solutions using IoT SDKs.

Azure IoT Hub

As already told, the Azure IoT hub mainly deals with the messaging capabilities of the devices. It embellishes the devices with internet facility and connects them directly to the cloud. In this way, the IoT hub bridges the gap between different devices by connecting them all to the cloud. The devices can then communicate with each other by send and receiving messages. As a matter of fact, the IoT hub alone  connects millions of devices to the cloud and billions of messages are exchanged between these devices every year. This further helps in the real-time implementation, analysis and storage of data which is exchanged by the devices. The IoT Hub enables secure two-way communication between devices using several open protocols like AMQPS, HTTPS and MQTT.

What’s More?

Microsoft has recently rendered the IoT capabilities to the US based Citizen Service group called AvePoint through its Azure IoT platform. The AvePoint is a public sector solution based on Microsoft Azure which helps the governments in automation of tasks like case management and incident reporting. AvePoint is built on top of the Azure Cloud and it not only serves the public sector but commercial organizations as well.

Microsoft is certain that using IoT capabilities will save a considerable amount of time and money, thereby speeding up the government processes.