How 5G, IoT and the cloud work together

1. Cloud computing

For many com­pa­nies that were forced to shut­ter their busi­ness premis­es due to coro­n­avirus restric­tions, the cloud has helped their new­ly decen­tralised enter­prise remain oper­a­tional.

Research from Deloitte found those firms that fared bet­ter in the pan­dem­ic had already adopt­ed vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion and cloud tech­nolo­gies. Those that hadn’t invest­ed scram­bled to do so; PwC reports spend­ing on cloud rose 37 per cent dur­ing the first quar­ter of 2020.

Essen­tial­ly, cloud com­put­ing allows busi­ness­es to run sophis­ti­cat­ed appli­ca­tions and store data on sev­er­al dis­persed com­put­ers, acces­si­ble via an inter­net con­nec­tion. Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, this meant com­pa­ny data and soft­ware appli­ca­tions could be accessed eas­i­ly at home, instead of being locked into office-based servers.

Nabil Bukhari, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer of net­work­ing firm Extreme Net­works, says pre-pan­dem­ic many busi­ness­es had avoid­ed cloud adop­tion, either because of fear of the tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ty or lack of bud­get. “The pan­dem­ic, how­ev­er, has been a cat­a­lyst to over­come these fears,” he says.

In fact, Tim Devine, a tech­nol­o­gy expert at man­age­ment con­sul­tan­cy PA Con­sult­ing, says with Microsoft Office mov­ing to the cloud, it is now “endem­ic” in every­thing we do.

“Almost every smart­phone app is con­nect­ing to a cloud ser­vice or appli­ca­tion, so every­one is effec­tive­ly using it,” he explains.

The shift from the cloud as a place to store data to com­pu­ta­tion pro­cess­ing was the game-chang­er, says Dr Jere­my Sil­ver, chief exec­u­tive of Dig­i­tal Cat­a­pult, a dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tion cen­tre, as it allowed busi­ness­es to run vir­tu­al machines and ser­vices which cre­at­ed new appli­ca­tions.

“In the film and media sec­tor, pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies are using cloud ser­vices to col­lab­o­rate on edit­ing and pro­duc­tion of films. And it’s being used to exchange and man­age data from sen­sor deploy­ments in fac­to­ry envi­ron­ments, which is one of the ways inter­net of things (IoT) tech­nol­o­gy and cloud are increas­ing­ly work­ing togeth­er,” says Sil­ver.

The increas­ing pro­lif­er­a­tion of IoT devices, there­fore, could dri­ve the adop­tion of cloud ser­vices. This will include hybrid cloud – a pub­lic, pri­vate and on-premise stor­age and com­put­ing envi­ron­ment – and edge cloud, where com­pu­ta­tion hap­pens clos­er to the IoT device, as com­pa­nies seek more con­trol over their sys­tems, says Chris Dan­do, chief tech­nol­o­gist at HPE.

“Not every­thing cap­tured at the edge will be processed in cen­tral dat­a­cen­tres, but at the edge for mis­sion-crit­i­cal rea­sons. There­fore, part of the IT envi­ron­ment is going to become more dis­trib­uted, but this will very much depend on the indi­vid­ual use-case and the amount of pro­cess­ing pow­er need­ed,” he explains.

2. IoT

Inter­est in IoT use-cas­es has also been boost­ed by the pan­dem­ic. Accord­ing to a recent McK­in­sey & Com­pa­ny sur­vey, the share of dig­i­tal or dig­i­tal­ly enabled prod­ucts in com­pa­ny exec­u­tives’ port­fo­lios has been accel­er­at­ed by sev­en years. Anoth­er report by Voda­fone found 84 per cent of exec­u­tives thought IoT appli­ca­tions were key to main­tain­ing busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

From con­nect­ed house­hold light­bulbs and ther­mostats to indus­try 4.0 appli­ca­tions, IoT net­works encom­pass a huge range of capa­bil­i­ties that can vary wild­ly between sec­tors. And while the notion of IoT has been around for some 20 years, adop­tion had pre­vi­ous­ly been slow. Is this because the cloud is first need­ed to facil­i­tate it?

“No,” says Dig­i­tal Catapult’s Sil­ver. “The cloud enhances IoT, but it’s pos­si­ble to run machine-to-machine data-gath­er­ing and to col­lect and deploy sen­sors across equip­ment and machin­ery in fac­to­ries and receive the sen­sor data on a local area net­work, such as wifi, and to do analy­sis local­ly.”

How­ev­er, the pow­er of com­bin­ing IoT and cloud can be “extra­or­di­nary”, he adds. “The cloud allows com­pa­nies, for exam­ple, to sen­sor-mon­i­tor five dif­fer­ent fac­to­ries and cre­ate an aggre­gat­ed view of the data, which can then be analysed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence for insights,” Sil­ver explains.

Whether edge or cen­tral cloud ser­vices are required depends on the oper­a­tion but, as a rule, for crit­i­cal appli­ca­tions, such as deploy­ing IoT-sup­port­ed autonomous machines on fac­to­ry floors, servers mak­ing deci­sions should be close by for reduced laten­cy. Adding 5G net­work­ing could improve effi­cien­cies fur­ther.

“The cost ben­e­fit is real­ly strong when you com­bine 5G, IoT and, increas­ing­ly, cloud,” says Sil­ver.

Fur­ther­more, the cloud makes many less crit­i­cal IoT appli­ca­tions, such as smart light­bulbs and ther­mostats, afford­able, says PA Consulting’s Devine.

“With­out the cloud, the cost of run­ning the appli­ca­tion would be expen­sive; sen­sors need to be low pow­er and low cost, which wouldn’t be pos­si­ble if embed­ded with oper­a­tional soft­ware,” he says.

Accord­ing to Dan­do at HPE, the accel­er­a­tion in the adop­tion of IoT use-cas­es dri­ven by the pan­dem­ic has includ­ed installing ther­mo­sta­t­ic cam­eras to mon­i­tor fever lev­els at build­ing entrances and enabling hands-free access. This has required a scal­ing up of com­put­ing capac­i­ty, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly in one spe­cif­ic net­work.

IoT devices, he says, are like­ly to always con­nect across mul­ti­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion meth­ods, depend­ing on the indi­vid­ual use-case.

“Things will be con­nect­ed across Blue­tooth, wifi, cel­lu­lar and phys­i­cal­ly cabled net­works; this will con­tin­ue for a long time because the require­ments of indi­vid­ual devices vary,” says Dan­do.

3. 5G

The impact of 5G, which offers ultra-fast speeds, increased spec­trum and low­er laten­cy, on IoT and cloud tech­nolo­gies remains to be seen, accord­ing to Devine.

“5G will be required for mas­sive IoT or many mil­lions of devices all con­nect­ed in a small area and the busi­ness case for those solu­tions are yet to be proven,” he says.

Mas­sive 5G-enabled IoT is expect­ed to be most valu­able for indus­tri­al appli­ca­tions, includ­ing hos­pi­tals, rail­ways and man­u­fac­tur­ing, to sup­port remote surgery and wire­less autonomous machines that could utilise pri­vate 5G net­work­ing.

“In an indus­tri­al envi­ron­ment, with mis­sion-crit­i­cal process­es that need real-time infor­ma­tion, 5G is prob­a­bly the only solu­tion,” says Ali­cia Asín, chief exec­u­tive of Libeli­um, an IoT appli­ca­tions com­pa­ny.

Ear­ly appli­ca­tions are being con­sid­ered in man­u­fac­tur­ing and Ger­man man­u­fac­tur­ers, in par­tic­u­lar, have been keen to buy pri­vate 5G spec­trum, says Devine. It is also being explored in film pro­duc­tion for wire­less mobile auto­mat­ed cam­eras.

“For com­pa­nies that already have an IoT solu­tion in place, 5G will allow for a tremen­dous expan­sion of oppor­tu­ni­ties. We’ll begin to see more and more devices con­nect­ing togeth­er on the same net­work at speeds, and with an ease, that cur­rent­ly do not exist,” says Kevin Hasley, man­ag­ing direc­tor of Root­Met­rics, a net­work per­for­mance mea­sur­ing com­pa­ny.

But if speed and per­for­mance are not crit­i­cal, 5G won’t be need­ed, says Asín. “A smart-park­ing net­work, for exam­ple, that requires low pow­er and per­for­mance doesn’t need 5G. IoT is not real­ly depen­dent on 5G or the cloud, it just depends on what you’re doing and how that might add to it or not,” she says.

For home­work­ers, 5G will have to com­pete with fibre broad­band, unless in an area with poor con­nec­tion, then the next gen­er­a­tion cel­lu­lar net­work “might be a very con­ve­nient and speedy way of deliv­er­ing that band­width”, says Devine.

“What’s going to hap­pen first, I think, is with more IoT devices automat­ing more work­places over time, peo­ple will access the sen­sor data remote­ly over the cloud and that will mean demand for band­width and 5G will increase,” he adds.

For imple­men­ta­tion, the dif­fi­cul­ty will be inte­grat­ing new gen­er­a­tions of tech­nol­o­gy onto old gen­er­a­tions. “It’s pos­si­ble exist­ing cloud ser­vices won’t be robust enough to sup­port the new IoT 5G-led ser­vices that will be avail­able,” says Devine.

Asín adds it’s also impor­tant to sup­port train­ing and edu­ca­tion “because oth­er­wise adop­tion of these tech­nolo­gies won’t hap­pen”.

There­fore, cloud, IoT and 5G are far from mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, but as Dan­do says, togeth­er they are most like­ly “bet­ter than the sum of their parts”

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