The basic premise of IoT is easily understood. Devices are deployed and connected for a huge range of use cases. These include; gathering business-critical data, managing access to rooms, tracking goods, monitoring people’s movement, controlling HVAC, and light systems. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination (and technology).
The massive scale at which these devices are coming online is more difficult to grasp. Try to picture the sheer number of connected “things”. From the tiniest sensors to the most feature-rich consumer device. Arm is predicting 1 trillion things will be connected by 2035.
What does that mean for an enterprise currently looking to digitally transform their business? To truly profit from the IoT, they will find themselves with millions of connected devices; located across the globe and accessed over a range of different mobile networks. Deploying, connecting, and managing these devices efficiently is not feasible for anyone to do manually. This is where a connectivity management platform with an automation engine can significantly lessen the admin burden. It can enable the enterprise to seek out new markets and new business models.
For an IoT deployment, basic connectivity management functions are needed around the clock, seven days a week, all year round. By automating these tasks, a business can respond immediately to changes in their network in real time. This is without requiring the personnel staff who is needed for extra resources working overtime.
The automation engine is built to constantly monitor network traffic for triggers. These are simple and rules set up by the business and tailored to their needs.
When a rule is triggered, the automation engine jumps into action, stepping in to manage the connection as required. If, for example, a subscriber does not connect for fifteen minutes, then you are notified. Companies are too often the last to know about issues with their devices. The reputation damage of the customer alerting you to a performance issue or device breaking can be severe. Catching an issue in fifteen minutes and being able to act proactively can make the difference between happy customers and disaster. Monitoring SIM connectivity helps catch problems quickly.
Trigger rules can be as simple or complex as required, built up by logical statements. To start off quickly, a range of common triggers are available as templates. These can include data usage and time-based triggers which send notifications or process SIM status or tariff changes.
Automation is especially necessary for enterprises using reprogrammable embedded SIMs (eUICC). This is to deploy devices which switch a network operator remotely as they move from one location to another. By applying eUICC technology, the device usage is billed to the local network on the local rate. Typically, a lower rate than a roaming solution can offer. Automated geographical management means that no matter where in the world the device ends up, the data can be billed locally. The addition of eUICC campaign management makes it easy to roll out changes to large-scale deployments.
Automation drastically reduces the burden of changing operator with eUICC campaign management, with changes automatically rolled out across selected SIMs from a single action. The enterprise can activate, swap, and deactivate profiles on eUICC SIMs and simultaneously troubleshoot multiple eUICC SIMs remotely. Automated profile switching saves on roaming costs.
The automation engine in Pelion Connectivity Management is so new that it is in beta. It is in a select group of pioneering companies within IoT. As the scale of the typical IoT deployment is set to increase dramatically over the coming years, automation becomes increasingly important. Pelion Connectivity Management is laying the groundwork for tomorrow’s IoT deployments, raising the bar on what level of automation is standard in IoT connectivity.
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