'Connected-by-Design' - an increasing necessity for IoT development

Yesterday we at Transforma Insights published a White Paper in collaboration with Eseye, 'Connected-by-Design: Optimising Device-to-Cloud Connectivity', which looks at some of the critical issues related to the development of IoT and suggests that a new 'Connected-by-Design' approach is necessary. Let me walk you briefly through some of the topics covered, although I thoroughly recommend you read through the whole thing available here: ‘Connected-by-Design: Optimising Device-to-Cloud Connectivity’.

First off, IoT is diverse. We all sort of understand this, but it's important to constantly reiterate that every use case considered under the umbrella of 'IoT' has unique deployment characteristics, whether it relates to access to power, requirements for bandwidth or latency, volume of data, frequency of communication, resiliency, up-time requirements, limitations of form-factor or cost, and numerous others. 

IoT is also more complex architecturally than pretty much any other ICT deployment you can think of. It involves hardware, middleware, connectivity, software, process integration and a few other steps along the way. The full stack of IoT is a complex development environment. And it's going to get more complex with the use of containers, AI, edge compute etc. Building to cope with these two dimensions of complexity makes IoT pretty tricky.

But the good news is that the tools are improving. There are a lot more IoT-specific technologies readily available to use. It's not enough, though, to throw these into the development process and hope for the best. I've discussed at quite some length in the past the need to cross-optimise the various elements of an IoT application, in order to cope with the constraints under which they are deployed and provide the most cost-effective way of supporting an application.

Because of these trends, the single most important element is the connectivity. Due to the distributed nature of IoT, connectivity is the lynch pin, and the most critical element to cross-optimise with others. All other dependencies will be subsidiary to those related to connectivity. As illustrated in the chart below, connectivity optimisation alone involves considerations of the application requirement for cost, power, speed, latency, mobility, security, space and numerous other things.

For this reason developers need to adopt a 'Connected-by-Design' approach, with considerations of connectivity permeating the whole of the solution development process, not bolted on at the end.

Many will be familiar with the concept of 'Secure-by-Design', whereby considerations of security are at the forefront of a product design process, permeating the whole development process. This provides a far superior framework than attempting to overlay security at the end of the development process. The same thing applies to connectivity in the context of IoT. It is fundamental to the proposition, acting as the glue that binds the various elements of the stack, and there are many potential pitfalls. This means that it cannot be simply bolted onto the solution after it has been built and/or deployed. It must permeate the design process. Hence 'Connected-by-Design'.