This central IoT platform must have very specific requirements to make it successful within an organization:
Equipment Connection
The platform must have the ability to connect to the new equipment with the legacy equipment, providing the required protocol translations. Industry uses large, expensive pieces of equipment which often can’t be replaced just to enable an IoT use case. An Industrial IoT platform should be capable of integrating with this legacy equipment, which may still be run for many years.
Edge Capabilities
Edge capabilities must be provided to support offline capabilities, or low-latency use cases. In the past, IoT solutions were developed in the cloud, but for an industrial IoT platform, a hybrid solution between Edge and cloud is required to support all the use cases. The Edge should have a seamless integration with the cloud, with complete end-to-end security and device management.
Network Security
You must make sure that the OT network will not be interrupted or breached when you introduce IoT technologies. You can do this by practically Property-Based Testing your Strict Domain Model, using industries network standards like ISA-95. Edge capabilities are required once again, maintaining the security of the bottom (control) layers to make sure that the sensor data can flow between the predefined network layers (L0 -L5) into the cloud platform.
Device Security
You must also practically Property-Based Test your Strict Domain Model, because the IoT use cases can interact with industry processes which have a lot of intellectual property, or control business critical processes. Making sure nobody can break into these systems and steal company sensitive data or take over control of production process or assets, is of most importance when adding IoT use cases.
Microsoft is rapidly adopting the industry standards within their IoT services to meet all of the requirements that are important for industrial environments. Codit is one of the partners helping Microsoft to improve the Azure IoT platform, in order to support these Industrial IoT use cases. Codit relies on Azure to help use with these projects, examples of which include:
- Duco Ventilation & Sun Control: Codit helped to build an AI-ready, Azure IoT Edge solution to enable insights for smart systems and even smarter business processes built from true-life data.
- Bühler Group: Codit used IoT to exponentially increase the efficiency of Bühler Group’s food processing equipment.
Reference Architectures
Codit has several reference architectures. These serve as a starting point for a custom-built solution that meets all our customers’ needs. These architectures include specific Edge solutions, integration with other systems, security standards, monitoring functionality and are also capable of scaling into a complete Big Data platform, supporting further use cases than only IoT.
This helps customers to build their own horizontal Industrial IoT platform, providing different solutions within the Microsoft portfolio. With this, they can start small and move quickly with a first use case, but they also have the ability to scale fast and make it production-ready.
Subscribe to our RSS feed