Insights

The Five Clouds of IoT

August 12, 2022

IoT Cloud Services

When starting a business or looking for an enhancement, it can be difficult to choose between all the different service offerings in the marketplace.

As a first step, the following questions should be considered:

• How are you connecting to the internet?
• What kind of device are you building on?
• What’s the scale of your deployment?
• What’s your cost and cost structure?
• What is your business model?

But the most important questions to answer for picking cloud services are:

• What are you willing to outsource?
• What should you outsource?
• What would get you to market faster if you went with a provider?

From there we can have a more grounded conversation on which aspects of the cloud are needed and which combination of providers they might want to evaluate. Very few service offerings will cover every aspect of an IoT deployment and business needs.

With each conversation I had, the more I started to realize that there might be different types of IoT cloud solutions. In fact, I think there are five. And while in practice different cloud companies might offer overlapping features, describing them as separate clouds will help us better understand the core strength of each cloud type and why we might want to use them

Why Are There Five Clouds of IoT?

Here are The Five Clouds of IoT:

• Device Cloud
• Connectivity Cloud
• Data Cloud
• Application Cloud
• Development Cloud

These are classifications based on the service offerings of companies throughout the ecosystem, including the company I founded a couple of years ago (Golioth). However, each cloud represents a business case being served. Each cloud type has a prime example of at least one company serving a particular area of focus. That’s how big the market is and how much need exists for service

https://www.iotforall.com/an-introduction-to-the-five-clouds-of-iot