Azure IoT Hub – An Excellent Way To Manage Your IoT Devices Through The Cloud

With an increasing number of organizations leveraging IoT technology with new devices and services, Microsoft’s Azure IoT suite with its powerful set of features offers an excellent solution.

What Is The Azure IoT Hub?

Azure IoT hub is a managed IoT service that is typically hosted on the cloud.  A part of Azure IoT technology, the IoT hub helps you establish secure and reliable device-cloud-device communication for a massive number of devices.

• Multiple device libraries for the most popular languages and platforms
• Offers built-in message routing to other Azure services
• Gives you a queryable store for synchronized state information and device metadata 
• Register devices at scale using the IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service
• Manage all your IoT devices at scale with device management
• Helps you leverage the power of the cloud 

How Can Azure IoT Hub Help You Manage Your IoT Devices?

Among the key ways the Azure IoT Hub helps you manage your IoT devices include –

1. Robust Bi-Directional Communication

Using Azure IoT Hub, you can safely and securely channel data both ways. It allows metrics to be sent from devices to the cloud and directed to various services for storage or processing. Apart from this, you can also send commands in the opposite direction, from the backend to the requisite devices.

The advanced Azure hub capabilities also allow you to create complex IoT solutions at scale. For instance, it makes it easier to create complex software for maintaining smart homes, managing industrial machinery, and also monitoring premises in offices.

Additionally, you can track various events, monitor connected networks, and also receive alarms if there are any issues.

Azure IoT Hub uses SAS token-based authentication to securely transfer data. These include –

• Individual X.509 certificate for secure authentication
• X.509 CA authentication for simple enrolment 

2. Seamless Device Management

The Azure IoT Hub offers seamless device management to help you register any new device to the Azure IoT Hub and manage it from there.

Further, using Microsoft’s IoT connector, you can generate a unique access key for every single device. This ensures that all your devices can only do what they are supposed to, and also allows you to disable specific devices when they aren’t working or get corrupted.

3. Integrate With Other Services

One of the highlights of the Azure IoT Hub is that you can easily integrate it with other Azure services to build comprehensive and end-to-end solutions.

For instance, you can use –

• Azure Logic Apps – To automate business processes
• Azure Event Grid – To enable your business to respond quickly to critical events in a secure, reliable and scalable manner
• Azure Stream Analytics – To run real-time analytic calculations on the data streaming from your IoT devices
• Azure Machine Learning – To add various machine learning and AI models to your solution

4. Secure Your Devices & Data Inside

Security is one of the key concerns when it comes to IoT devices.  Microsoft invests heavily in ensuring the security implementation correctly not just within Azure IoT Hub but within the entire Microsoft Azure platform.

Azure defender for IoT ensures complete security and reliability of communication within your IoT devices by features such as –

• Device registration and authentication
• Device management tools
• Message delivery/acknowledgement
• Enriching messages with additional information to optimize as well as speed up the delivery and processing

5. Stack Hub Enables Efficient Deployment

The Azure Stack Hub primarily offers a unique way to run your apps in an on-premises environment and seamlessly deliver Azure services in your data center.

Owing to its consistent cloud platform, you can make better technology decisions based on your individual business requirements rather than taking them based on technology limitations only.

Further, standard protocols for internet communications and messaging are used within the Azure IoT Hub. Although the Azure IoT Hub SDKs are available on many platforms (C, C#, Java, JavaScript), the implementations of standard HTTP and AMQP 1.0 protocols ensure that any programming language and platform can be easily implemented to communicate effectively with the Azure IoT Hub.

6. Analyze Data With Azure Event Hub

Azure Event Hub allows you to handle and analyse millions of events or stream them into various applications. Since variable load profiles such as mobile apps and application performance counters generate telemetry data every second, there is also a need to process and analyse this data. 

Event Hub consumes all these events to accommodate various load profiles and process massive amounts of data.

To Conclude

Internet of Things is largely known for the interconnectivity between various devices and users and leads us to the infrastructure of any IoT solution including firmware, hardware and software parts. 

When it comes to powerful IoT service providers specifically, Microsoft is considered one of the best names in the industry. Its Azure IoT Suite not only helps you to develop various custom IoT products but also makes the deployment of any architecture quite simple and fast.

In addition, these services can be integrated into most operating systems and devices easily and allow you to collect and analyze massive volumes of data followed by using it for real-time predictive analytics. High scalability is another huge benefit with Azure IoT Hub as it offers the ability to scale to facilitate communications with millions of simultaneously connected devices logging millions of events every second.