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The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming how businesses across every industry operate. There were 15.14 billion IoT devices in 2023,1 and that number is expected to reach over 25 billion by 2030.2 This explosion of connected devices brings new opportunities for enterprises – but it also creates unique challenges around managing connectivity for massive fleets of distributed IoT devices, making a robust IoT connectivity management platform more important than ever.
A connectivity management platform (CMP) is a tool designed specifically to help enterprises manage the complexity of scaling IoT deployments with centralized orchestration, monitoring, and control of connectivity for massive numbers of devices across locations and networks. In this blog, we’ll discuss how a purpose-built CMP can help your organization maximize the business value derived from IoT investments.
What Is a Connectivity Management Platform?
An IoT connectivity management platform is a centralized software solution that simplifies and automates device connectivity administration for a large-scale IoT deployment spanning multiple devices, networks, and locations. It ensures each IoT device can securely and reliably communicate with the business, regardless of the global location or network type.
CMPs provide businesses with a unified interface and toolset to remotely configure, monitor, and manage the wireless connectivity of distributed IoT devices on an individual or group basis, eliminating much of the manual work associated with handling connections at scale. Advanced CMPs use over-the-air technologies to provision and switch SIM profiles and rate plans remotely across entire device fleets without physically touching devices.
What Are the Benefits of Connectivity Management?
Managing multiple IoT devices brings complex orchestration challenges, but a comprehensive IoT connectivity management platform can give your business many powerful tools to optimize operations, including:
Simplified Management at Scale
A CMP offers managed cellular connectivity service for thousands or even millions of devices across locations and networks. Automation and remote over-the-air device management streamline massive deployments and eliminate the need for manual administration.
Reduced Costs
Connectivity management platforms help businesses reduce the total cost of ownership of IoT solutions by monitoring data usage, preventing overages, and intelligently switching rate plans to optimize costs across deployments. By consolidating billing and usage data, your teams can gain insights to negotiate better volume discounts with carriers.
Improved Security
33% of IoT developers say their primary concern is security.3 IoT connectivity management platforms strengthen security by enabling device authentication, VPNs, firewalls, and traffic filtering to protect cellular devices and data. Security tools are handled at the network level rather than on resource-constrained devices, and IT teams can enforce policies to restrict device communication to authorized networks only.
Greater Reliability
IoT success depends on reliable, always-on cellular connectivity. A CMP helps ensure connectivity by enabling functionality such as remote troubleshooting, automated network failover, and tools to identify coverage gaps. Proactive monitoring and alerting notify your technical teams of issues before they can disrupt operations, and automated carrier switching provides redundancy.
Better Visibility
Real-time monitoring, alerting, and reporting give complete visibility into the performance of the global IoT network to enhance decision-making. Dashboards provide actionable insights into device status, connectivity metrics, data usage, and more, and you can generate custom reports on demand.
6 Essential Connectivity Management Platform Features
When researching IoT connectivity management platforms, choosing features that match your organization's unique needs is critical. Here are some key capabilities to look for:
1. Global IoT Connectivity
Look for a connectivity management platform that enables seamless global connectivity across all major cellular IoT networks worldwide. This includes legacy 2G and 3G networks and new LTE categories like LTE-M and NB-IoT. The IoT platform should automatically select optimal available networks based on criteria you configure, like cost, performance, and roaming restrictions. Advanced platforms use eSIM technology to enable over-the-air (OTA) switching across hundreds of carrier profiles without physically swapping SIMs.
2. Comprehensive Device Management
The right CMP will allow you to manage devices individually or in custom groups with granular control. You should be able to remotely activate, deactivate, reboot, update firmware, modify SIM profiles, and complete other OTA device management tasks from a central dashboard. The platform should also make it easy to automate profiles and configurations that can be pushed to groups of devices matching the criteria you specify.
3. SIM Profile Management
Choose an IoT connectivity platform that enables centralized management of eSIM and SIM profiles across your deployment. As you scale to potentially millions of SIMs across networks, geographies, and device types, efficient profile management is crucial. The platform should make SIM provisioning seamless, allowing you to add profiles to groups of devices, modify parameters like data limits, enable roaming, and activate or deactivate service. You should be able to manage SIM inventory as well as customize rate plans tailored to your needs.
4. Built-In Security Features
Security is crucial for IoT deployments processing and transmitting sensitive data over public cellular networks. CMPs can provide an extra layer of protection to strengthen device security with VPN tunnels to encrypt device traffic, firewalls to filter traffic and network access, and device authentication to prevent unauthorized access. Other security features include SIM profile locking, tamper alerts, and protection against IoT DDoS attacks, which grew by 300% in the first half of 2023.4
5. Monitoring and Alerts
Real-time monitoring, alerting, and reporting functionality provide the necessary visibility to optimize each IoT deployment. You should be able to define rules to trigger alerts for issues like unplanned roaming, data overages, poor signal strength, and more. Historical reports help identify trends and outliers to improve decision-making, while IoT data exports enable further analysis. Monitoring device and SIM lifecycle events can maximize uptime.
6. Rate Plan Management
A CMP should offer a unified view of rate plans and billing across network operators, enabling you to customize plans tailored to your deployment's needs and switch plans OTA to reduce operating costs. Consolidated invoicing allows simple billing management, even with thousands of different service providers, devices, and plans. Optimize expenditures by leveraging insights from usage data to negotiate volume discounts and automation rules to change your rate plan based on your set criteria.
Optimize Your IoT Connectivity Management Investments With TailWind
Comprehensive IoT connectivity management is mission-critical for organizations deploying intelligent connected devices. Choosing the right connectivity management platform can help your business maximize ROI, reduce costs, enhance reliability, and get more value from your IoT devices.
If you're looking to streamline your enterprise IT and harness the full potential of your connected devices, reach out to TailWind today. Our experts can help you maximize your IoT investments and ensure your multi-location business is poised for success in the digital age.
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