Overview of IoT device management

- [Instructor] We're living in a connected world where there are increasing number of IoT devices deployed in our lives for a broad spectrum of applications. Some of these applications are for the comfort of our lives. Some applications are for mission critical tasks in industrial environments. Some applications are used to improve the agriculture and to protect our environment. The applications are just limitless. And they may feel like when we talk about IoT we may get lost in the possibilities. What would not make us get lost is grasping the enabling technologies that all IoT systems will need. Device management is one of such important technology segments that IoT stakeholders, innovators, and makers need to know about. To understand it let's take a look what IoT system will look like. Almost all IoT systems needs to be deployed in the field and secured. The meaning secure is multi-faceted. It can mean the scalability of our working system deployment in terms of the IoT devices. It can also mean it's scalable enough to accommodate the handling of data, services, and users. For example, when we have a large scale IoT system consisting of hundreds or thousands of geographically distributed sensing devices able to talk each other and to do some application specific tasks. For example, to facilitate operations of automation control processors in a factory or a facility system to monitor energy consumption in an office building to managing crops with temperature and soil moisture data sense. Or to allow vehicles on the road to transmit data for remote diagnostics and emergent responses just to name a few here. All these real world IoT applications come with some practical operational challenges. For example, to make the device configuration remotely and autonomously opted software for bug fixes or improvements retrieve device and the location and set some extra custom added data for additional purposes. All these challenges belong to the domain of device management in IoT. A device management solution can provide the manageability to a scalable IoT system deployment. This is too generic still. So, in this course, we use the definition of device management give by the Open Mobile Alliance where the device management is defined as, "Providing remote device manageability to connected devices, such as provisioning configurations, and updates on firmware, status, and diagnostic information." Centered on this definition, device management allows third parties to carry out the difficult procedures of configuring devices on behalf of the end users. Some typical third parties are operators, service providers, or corporate information management departments. Since the increasing number and kind of devices in the IoT introduce new challenges that the traditional technologies cannot solve well. IoT device management requires new solutions. Let's see some of the main challenges faced by IoT devices. First, there are various type of IoT devices where many of them often have a limited resources and the capabilities in a network with limited bandwidths. Second, most of the IoT devices need to perform the machine-to-machine communication to exchange data with wired or wireless connectivity options. In this context, the connected devices can be called IoT devices or M2M devices where we can think of M2M devices as a subset of IoT devices as well. Which often has less powerful hardware resources than the regular personal computer, for example. In this course these two terms are simply used interchangeably. Third, most of the time in the IoT we don't need much manual intervention. So, the management procedures may need to be done efficiently, autonomously, and securely on one or multiple devices. Fourth, we often need a scalable setup when it comes to IoT device management. For example, we need to manage a large scale of IoT devices across communication networks and the platforms. And last, the device management's solution needs to be able to handle the manageability in the entire life cycle of an IoT device. To summarize, there are advantages of employing device management in the IoT. It can support deployments of the real world IoT or M2M systems at a scale. It can reduce operational costs as, for example, devices can be managed in a flexible way and it can enhance maintenance through the device life cycle. It can also mitigate security risks. As for example, the devices can update the latest software and the configurations. It therefore introduces less risks and increases opportunities for IoT businesses. Overall, a device management solution can add much value to customers in IoT businesses.