The Internet of Things refers to any network of things or physical objects that are or can be connected to the Internet to collect and share data without human interaction.
Kevin Ashton devised the term “IOT” in 1999. He worked with radio frequency identification (RFID) which was originally conceived of as being able to tag every object with machine readable codes. These are small RFID tags and would allow computers to passively manage all of the things to which they were attached.
Today, “IOT” has grown into a much broader concept. The IOT includes devices that are connected with technologies beyond just RFID, along with their sensors, actuators, analytics and AI platforms that drive actions and responses and other technologies affiliated technology stacks.
An IoT solution is a combination of devices or other data sources, equipped with sensors and connected hardware to securely report information back to an IoT platform. The connected sensors and devices constitute the endpoints while the information provided by the devices helps users to know some status or to answer a question or solve a problem.
The purpose of a PoC is to experiment with a solution in your environment, collect data, and evaluate performance from a set timeline on a set budget. A proof of concept is a low-risk way to introduce IoT to an organization.
Cloud platforms are based in the Internet cloud and can be accessed from anywhere. An IoT cloud platform aggregates data from connected devices and allows users to monitor and manage those devices either manually or automatically. An administrator can check an IOT system’s security and enable security features, “see” the system through visualization tools, design automatic workflows and interact with other systems that are connected to the Internet. IOT cloud platforms typically include tools to build applications in easy-to-use WYSIWYG editors that require little or no coding.