Unleashing the Convergence of Cloud Computing With Internet of Things: Drivers for Integration

Introduction

By definition, cloud computing is an on demand service model for the provision of Information Technology. Virtualization and distributed computing technologies forms its foundation. Further it has the technological ability of transferring terabytes of torrents between data centers. Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as a network of physical objects, and devices that contain embedded technology (like intelligent sensors, controllers etc.) which can communicate, sense, or interact with internal or external systems. With IoTs, any physical object or devices; virtually ‘anything’ can become part of IoTs based services; and by this, a lot of data, generated. In order to create more valuable services, the data generated need to be managed based on its requirements. The Cloud Computing of IoT (CIoT) can be viewed as an advanced technology that hinges on the named pillars below (Rao et al., 2012).

• 1.

  Anything is identifiable at Anytime and Anywhere

• 2.

  Anything can communicate at Anytime and Anywhere

• 3.

  Anything can interact Anywhere and Anytime

Integration of IoTs with the Cloud is becoming a novel technological approach and is termed as Cloud of Things (CoTs). IoTs and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) seem to have had an ever increasing data and also related underlying resources, to which CoTs, serve as the means of handling them. IoTs and CoTs inadvertently rely on WSNs reception to the extent that, WSNs have increasingly become unavoidable, and making it a vital segment of the future Internet.

Characterized by real world things with limitation in storage and processing capacity, IoTs generally have the consequential issues of security, privacy, reliability and performance,. At the same time, cloud computing has virtually unlimited capabilities such as storage, processing power, privacy and security. Cloud computing provides infinite computation and storage through a shared pool of resources, which can dynamically be allocated and easily used by any IoT application.

The Internet of Things (IoT) worldview depends on smart and self-arranging hubs (things), interconnected in a dynamic and worldwide system framework. The web of things generally alludes to this present reality and seemingly insignificant details restricted capacity and the vital issues about unwavering quality, execution, security and protection. Like Cloud computing, distributed computing practically has boundless limit of capacity and handling power which can be retailored or further developed innovatively to any rate to a specific degree to handle the vast majority of the Internet of things (Chen et al., 2014; Tao, 2014; Wang et al., 2014) restricted storage and processing capacity. In this manner, a novel IT worldview in which Cloud computing and IoT, are integrally consolidated, is relied upon in the present and the future and in this study, the researchers call it, Cloud IoT (CIoT).

Cloud computing and IoT serve to increase efficiency in our everyday tasks, and the two have a complimentary relationship. IoT generates massive amounts of big data, and Cloud computing provides a pathway for the generated big data to travel through to its destination. Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the several IoT Cloud platforms at work today, points out six advantages and benefits of cloud computing as follows:

• •

  Enables a user to only pay for computing resources that they use.

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  Enable service providers (such as AWS) to achieve greater economies of scale: thus reduced service costs for customers.

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  Takes of Infrastructure capacity needs and maintenance, from users shoulder and thus enabling users to deploy any application anywhere in the world within minutes

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  Ensures the availability of resources with increased speed and agility to users (such as developers).