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By Indranil Chakraborty, Product Manager, Google Cloud
Today we’re announcing a new fully-managed Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service called Google Cloud IoT Core. Cloud IoT Core makes it easy for you to securely connect your globally distributed devices to GCP, centrally manage them and build rich applications by integrating with our data analytics services. Furthermore, all data ingestion, scalability, availability and performance needs are automatically managed for you in GCP style.
When used as part of a broader Google Cloud IoT solution, Cloud IoT Core gives you access to new operational insights that can help your business react to, and optimize for, change in real time. This advantage has value across multiple industries; for example:
- Utilities can monitor, analyze and predict consumer energy usage in real time
- Transportation and logistics firms can proactively stage the right vehicles/vessels/aircraft in the right places at the right times
- Oil and gas and manufacturing companies can enable intelligent scheduling of equipment maintenance to maximize production and minimize downtime
So, why is this the right time for Cloud IoT Core?
About all the things
Many enterprises that rely on industrial devices such as sensors, conveyor belts, farming equipment, medical equipment and pumps — particularly, globally distributed ones — are struggling to monitor and manage those devices for several reasons:
- Operational cost and complexity: The overhead of managing the deployment, maintenance and upgrades for exponentially more devices is stifling. And even with a custom solution in place, the resource investments required for necessary IT infrastructure are significant.
- Patchwork security: Ensuring world-class, end-to-end security for globally distributed devices is out of reach — or at least not a core competency — for most organizations.
- Data fragmentation: Despite the fact that machine-generated data is now an important data source for making good business decisions, the massive amount of data generated by these devices is often stored in silos with a short expiration date, and hence never reaches downstream analytic systems (nor decision makers).
Cloud IoT Core is designed to help resolve these problems by removing risk, complexity and data silos from the device monitoring and management process. Instead, it offers you the ability to more securely connect and manage all your devices as a single global system. Through a single pane of glass you can ingest data generated by all those devices into a responsive data pipeline — and, when combined with other Cloud IoT services, analyze and react to that data in real time.
Key features and benefits
Several key Cloud IoT Core features help you meet these goals, including:
- Fast and easy setup and management: Cloud IoT Core lets you connect up to millions of globally dispersed devices into a single system with smooth and even data ingestion ensured under any condition. Devices are registered to your service quickly and easily via the industry-standard MQTT protocol. For Android Things-based devices, firmware updates can be automatic.
- Security out-of-the-box: Secure all device data via industry-standard security protocols. (Combine Cloud IoT Core with Android Things for device operating-system security, as well.) Apply Google Cloud IAM roles to devices to control user access in a fine-grained way.
- Native integration with analytic services: Ingest all your IoT data so you can manage it as a single system and then easily connect it to our native analytic services (including Google Cloud Dataflow, Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine) and partner BI solutions (such as Looker, Qlik, Tableau and Zoomdata). Pinpoint potential problems and uncover solutions using interactive data visualizations, or build rich machine-learning models that reflect how your business works.
- Auto-managed infrastructure: All this in the form of a fully-managed, pay-as-you-go GCP service, with no infrastructure for you to deploy, scale or manage.
"With Google Cloud IoT Core, we have been able to connect large fleets of bicycles to the cloud and quickly build a smart transportation fleet management tool that provides operators with a real-time view of bicycle utilization, distribution and performance metrics, and it forecasts demand for our customers."
— Jose L. Ugia, VP Engineering, Noa Technologies
Next steps
Cloud IoT Core is currently available as a private beta, and we’re launching with these hardware and software partners:
Cloud IoT Device Partners
- Actions Semiconductor
- Allwinner Technology
- ARM
- Marvell
- Microchip
- Intel
- Mongoose OS
- NXP
- Realtek
- Sierra Wireless
- SOTEC
Cloud IoT Application Partners
When generally available, Cloud IoT Core will serve as an important, foundational tool for hardware partners and customers alike, offering scalability, flexibility and efficiency for a growing set of IoT use cases. In the meantime, we look forward to your feedback!