Re-engineering Legacy IoT platforms to cloud based platforms: Part 1

Re-engineering Legacy IoT platforms to cloud based platforms has become increasingly important for organizations looking to modernize their technology infrastructure and stay competitive in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s becoming crucial for businesses to adopt cloud-based platforms that offer scalability, reliability and real-time data access.

One common challenge organizations face when re-engineering their IoT platforms is the need to maintain the features and use cases that were built into the legacy system. To ensure a smooth transition, it’s important to carefully plan and execute the re-engineering process, paying close attention to the existing architecture, data, and use cases.

The legacy platform in this case was built on a monolithic architecture, which means that all the components of the system were tightly coupled and required significant changes to be made to the entire platform for even small updates. This type of architecture can make it difficult to scale the platform as needed and can lead to slow performance and downtime.

The solution to this challenge is to re-engineer the legacy platform to a microservices-based monitoring, provisioning and analytical platform, which can provide organizations with greater flexibility, scalability and resilience. In this case, the organization is looking to move its legacy platform to the Azure cloud, which offers a range of advanced features and services for IoT applications.

One of the key benefits of re-engineering to a cloud-based platform is real-time access to data. This allows organizations to quickly and easily analyze and visualize their data, making informed decisions based on real-time insights. With Azure, organizations can take advantage of its cloud-based analytics capabilities, such as Power BI, to turn data into actionable insights.

It’s also important to ensure that data is in sync throughout the re-engineering process, to avoid any potential loss of information or disruption to the business. To achieve this, organizations can use Azure’s built-in data synchronization features, such as Azure Cosmos DB, which provides globally distributed, multi-model databases with low latency and high throughput.

Finally, it’s important to note that both platforms should be available at the same time during the re-engineering process. This allows organizations to perform testing and validation on the new platform while still relying on the legacy platform for business-critical operations. This ensures a smooth and seamless transition to the new platform, without any disruption to the business.

Re-engineering legacy IoT platforms to cloud-based platforms can provide organizations with a range of benefits, including improved scalability, reliability, and real-time data access. With careful planning and execution, organizations can ensure that they don’t lose any of the features or use cases that were built into the legacy platform, and can successfully transition to the new platform with minimal disruption to their business.

In the next part, we will discuss steps on how to go about re-engineering.