The Four Pillars of Effective IoT Device Management
This white paper from Laird Connectivity provides a game plan for avoiding many frustrating, costly device management problems.
Device management is critical to the long-term success of any IoT deployment. One major contributing factor to confusion around device management is the difficulty of defining what exactly it means.
The author of the article you read yesterday about device management may be discussing its use in a very different context than the company that is promoting its device management platform at the event you attend next week. So often, companies are talking about different things entirely but use similar language, making it difficult to apply to your own solution.
It’s not always an apples-to-apples discussion due to the variety of needs from IoT operations and use cases. It is important to separate the topic of managing devices from discussions of a related but different topic: telemetry. Telemetry is the stream of business-related time-series data that comes from IoT devices such as sensors and other equipment – which organizations rely on to gain actionable insights for their operations.
This data is often the basis for digital products and services where reliability is key. Ensuring reliable telemetry delivery is a primary goal of every IoT deployment, and effective device management is the means to achieving that goal. Without the right strategy during IoT device design, companies will not reliably get the data streams they have invested so much to obtain.
The term is also used differently across disciplines, often meaning different things depending on what type of devices are involved – for example, corporate workstations, smartphones, and tablets are fundamentally different from the device management of headless, low-power embedded IoT devices running purpose-built software stacks.
Industry discussions often treat device management as a one-size-fits-all topic. With so little distinction between traditional IT/DevOps vs. embedded IoT device management needs, the issue becomes less and less clear to product engineers looking for practical advice on the subject.
Download this white paper and learn how to implement a game plan for avoiding the many frustrating, costly problems that come with managing devices.
