Outsourcing has long been a common business practice, from hiring an attorney for legal services to using an outside firm to fabricate printed circuit boards for building electronic assemblies. With the advent of Cloud Computing, IT departments now have an efficient way to outsource a variety of their data processing functions. Extending beyond corporate data centers, this digital paradigm has begun making inroads within the world of embedded computing.
Classic Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has manifested itself in a number of ways. Using the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model companies like Amazon provide virtual servers to their clients to use as they see fit, allowing them to select their own operating system and application software, thus freeing users from the need to own or maintain any hardware. Scalability is easy, as CPU cycles and bandwidth can be added on the fly.
By deploying the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, organizations such as SalesForce.com can provide everything from hardware to operating system and software on a pay-as-you-go basis. In this situation, customers can access their data from anywhere in the world using a browser while the service takes care of system upgrades and backups. Besides training, internal resource requirements are nil.
Enter Embedded Computing
So how can embedded hardware make use of these new services, in effect creating an embedded cloud? By deploying a “device-to-cloud” architecture that allows embedded devices located within a factory or deployed remotely in mobile applications to communicate directly with cloud-based services. Devices can thus be monitored and managed from any location, and collected data shared with multiple applications which also reside in the cloud – a key consideration for industrial automation projects.
The energy industry is another example, as monitoring devices are located throughout the extraction, transportation and refining processes. The same can also be said for many government and defense applications that need to receive and process data from multiple points, though in both cases, data security is of great concern. In the end, security may be the embedded cloud’s greatest challenge.
VDC Research Group calls these embedded devices Scalable Edge Nodes (SEN) to denote the fact that they are located along the edge of the embedded infrastructure and provide communication to the cloud. During a conversation with Chris Rezendes, Executive Vice President of VDC Research Group, he talked about a relatively new model to serve the embedded cloud – HaaS (Hardware as a Service).
This managed services solution encompasses supervisory monitoring and control applications, creating embedded application clouds that utilize on-site hardware deployed with service level agreements (SLAs) which define software, service and performance obligations. Time will tell if such a model gains traction, but the embedded cloud, in any form, can provide customers with some key advantages.
- Flexible processing capacity – pay for what you need
- Information everywhere – unlimited access points
- Infinite connectivity – as many devices as needed
So what are your plans for exploring the embedded cloud? How could your organization take advantage of such managed services on a regional, national or global basis?
