Netshield has developed an end-to-end IoT offering that helps customers better build and incorporate IoT into their greenfield or existing business environments. The full solution extends from sensors to intelligent gateways and monitoring tools that enable a client to view the full spectrum of their environment in a single or structured dashboard. All of which can be acquired as an end-to-end solution or as components for an existing environment.
The biggest challenge with IoT is according to Netshield CEO, Inus Dreckmeyr, the fact that few clients have the luxury of rolling out a greenfields site, instead they have disparate and in some cases legacy environments that are extremely complex, and as a result are difficult to monitor and control, into which they now need to include IoT.
“Working with customers on their IoT deployments we have noticed that the disparate nature of the sensors, devices and systems that a customer wants to gather data from, can lead to distributions that simply don’t work, or that only provide a fraction of what the client really wants from their IoT,” states Dreckmeyr. “Ultimately clients are left unsatisfied with their IoT deployments which sours the whole experience.”
It is against this backdrop that the company has developed a series of IoT products and solutions that are specifically designed to “talk to each other” through robust integration and adherence to global standards, including communication protocols such as MQTT, AMQP, COAP and SNMP. Furthermore they are able to roll out as single-based solutions or as an end-to-end IoT environment from the position of the sensor in the field right through to the database.
Critically the gateways can relay events to multiple storage devices and databases simultaneously, to ensure simplification of integration into existing monitoring tools. Thus an IoT protocol can be used for bulk storage of events while active events are logged into existing management tools.
In line with this, making use of sensors, gateways and dashboards from Netshield, the company is able to ensure that a client can secure all of the events and alerts received by sensors, send them to the database and enable reporting for later analysis and business intelligence. Critically Dreckmeyr says the communication between devices can be problematic, especially if this is hooking into multiple data sources.
“Our Netshield IoT gateways are easy to roll out and deploy, they integrate with the majority of the major cloud vendors, such as Azure, AWS, SAP and IBM, to ensure data is correctly and accurately recorded from the sensor to the cloud or database. They support all the major IoT communication protocols and will continue to log event data when the primary communication links fail. When a connection is re-established they will update the information they have recorded and the events they have logged, back to the database.
“We have also developed a management and monitoring dashboard that can provide a full view of the IoT environment and likewise, will alert users to failures of sensors, down to an individual level. Our gateways also support third party installations and provide a single view of multiple environments via a single dashboard, and they simplify the complexity of IoT and network monitoring and control to a level that anyone can understand,” adds Dreckmeyr.
When deployed, a Netshield IoT gateway will relay events to a client’s cloud-based IoT-Hub, a private WAN, to a cloud or a local database for future analysis and intelligence. With its multi-layered hierarchical dashboard structure, users can view the full network and drill down layer by layer right down to individual sensors. These dashboards are also interactive and the views can be manipulated to meet a client’s exact requirements, and have inherent built in security that supports multi-layer access and role and user parameter settings.
The Netshield IoT offering can be deployed as a bundled end-to-end IoT service or be bought and implemented as components to support an existing IoT environment. Its extensive range of sensors can also assist with identifying and alerting a user to events such as changes in temperature, fire, water detection, smoke, gas, motion and access control, to name but a few.
As part of its value-added offering Netshield also assists clients with backup stock, extended warrantees, financing options and an OEM monitoring services.