The Role of Automation in IoT Deployments
Written by: Jason Segarra
Published: October 4, 2022
Automation allows businesses to create new products and services more efficiently, while also helping to improve existing products and processes. More than that, IoT automation can help you avoid common mistakes during IoT deployments, creating a more secure and reliable network, particularly in fleets with hundreds or thousands of devices that cross international borders and compliance requirements.
The role of automation in improving fleet management is becoming more evident as organizations rush to meet their digital transformation goals. In this blog, we will look at how IoT is empowering organizations throughout the world by enabling automation that improves business flow and functionality.
Automation Removes The Inefficiencies Created by Human Error
Automation can eliminate costly errors and create opportunities to improve service while improving the user experience. It does so, primarily, by removing the potential for human error from potentially sensitive and mission-critical processes within an IoT deployment. Some examples of how automation can improve an IoT operation include:
- Reducing Manual Steps in Device Maintenance: Automating tasks like software updates and configuration changes saves time for systems admins, and ensures that devices and software are up to date with the latest patches and security updates. This will also help devices connect and transmit data faster than ever before.
- Improve Service Quality: Eliminating inconsistencies between different teams working on the same project or across projects with similar components (e.g., two companies deploying sensors at the same time) can remove confusion about how things should work together. This will also reduce time spent troubleshooting issues between teams.
- Managing Security Certificates: A recent DigiCert survey found that enterprise organizations typically manage more than 50,000 security certificates. With so many certificates to manage, outages can happen quite often – and manually managing them can be timely. As such, automating PKI certificate management is useful enough that 91% of those surveyed are planning to adopt it in the coming year.
- Securing System Software Supply Chains: Automating authentication, authorization, and encryption processes can help maintain a high level of security when dealing with third-party software as well. Automation can even be used to scan systems for known vulnerabilities.
Automation Helps Optimize Fleet Management
As the number of connected devices continues to grow, so too does the complexity and cost of managing them. As such, IoT providers are always looking for ways to optimize management as they scale deployments across geographies, industries, assets, and business units.
The ability to automate has enabled IoT providers to deliver better customer experiences by eliminating costly data collection, analysis, and reporting errors. Removing the human element from these processes drastically limits the potential for errors and speeds up computational tasks, particularly when combined with AI technologies.
Beyond reduced costs or increased efficiency, automation device management can improve the customer experience while making it easier for organizations to adapt to changing markets. This, in turn, can help businesses gain a competitive advantage over other companies, granting them the ability to make big-picture decisions about how best to evolve their services based on real-time insights from their deployed fleet of devices, across multiple branches/locations/industries or use cases.
Automating Provisioning Can Reduce Errors and Save Time
The ability to perform real-time provisioning is another benefit of automation that’s important when it comes to IoT deployments. Automating the provisioning process not only reduces errors and saves time, it also allows organizations to provision devices in bulk, rather than one at a time.
Automation ensures that only authorized users are able to access sensitive information such as passwords or certificates associated with your systems. By automating this process, you can ensure that your endpoints are safe from malicious attacks and data theft while reducing operational costs by eliminating manual processes. Removing the potential for human error also makes services more reliable for end users of IoT solutions
By automating your provisioning process and eliminating manual steps, you can ensure that your organization has access to secure, high-quality data while also reducing costs by eliminating redundant tasks.
Conclusion
We’ve seen that automation can be an important part of the IoT ecosystem. It can help save time and money while improving service quality for consumers and businesses alike. By removing manual operations from mission-critical processes, organizations can streamline their IoT projects, maintain a higher degree of security, and lower the costs of these essential business functions.
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