IoT landscape splits into volume and value service providers

With cloud communications an essential enabler and a substantial part of the operating costs of IoT services, organisations are assessing how to procure cloud capabilities in the most efficient way that best suits their business case and gives them the flexibility to adapt and scale up.

IoT Now interviewed Nick Earle, the chairman and chief executive of Eseye to understand the likely impact of embedded and integrated SIM (eSIM and iSIM) on cloud communications

IoT Now: Inefficiency can make or break IoT business cases so how do you see the role of cloud communication platform providers in enabling greater efficiency and tighter control of cloud costs for IoT?

Nick Earle: Hyperscale cloud providers will play a key role in IoT deployments especially for global roll-outs which need a consistent set of managed services. In addition, they will offer a rich set of development tools and applications which can be easily accessed to provide analytics and insight on the device data. As a result, their low-cost model will tempt many first time IoT project owners to build proof of concept solutions on their stacks.

However, the last 15 years have shown that in spite of their low costs and scalability most large enterprises have not fully moved all their applications to the hyperscale providers. Instead, they have adopted a hybrid cloud model where core applications remain on private clouds and context applications are federated across the hyperscale providers. The reason for this is that they believe that they can exert more control over areas like policy, security and data sovereignty by adopting a private cloud approach. When looking at IoT, I expect that these same CxO concerns will drive a similar approach. For example, applications and storage will move to the hyperscalers but control over policy and governance will still be enabled across private encrypted multi-protocol layer switching (MPLS) networks which enable network level orchestration (NLO) from the centre to the edge. Given that most IoT devices will connect over mobile network operator (MNO) networks these NLO capabilities will either be provided by MNOs on an individual basis or by MVNOs who provide MNO agnostic embedded universal integrated circuit card (eUICC) connectivity switching across multiple MNOs over a single MPLS network. This is Eseye’s approach.

Continue reading this article on Page 16 inside IoT Now Magazine Q4 2021