Data Analytics in Internet of

Things (IoT)
Data Analytics in Internet of Things (IoT)
• IoT and data remain intrinsically linked together.

• Data consumed and produced keeps growing at an ever expanding rate.

• This influx of data is fueling widespread IoT adoption as there will be nearly 30.73 billion IoT
connected devices in near future

• The Internet of Things (IoT) is an interconnection of several devices, networks, technologies,

and human resources to achieve a common goal.

• There are a variety of IoT-based applications being used in different sectors and have
succeeded in providing huge benefits to the users.
Data Analytics in Internet of Things (IoT)
• The data generated from IoT devices turns out to be of value only if it
gets subjected to analysis, which brings data analytics into the picture.

• Data Analytics (DA) is defined as a process, which is used to examine big

and small data sets with varying data properties to extract meaningful
conclusions and actionable insights.

• These conclusions are usually in the form of trends, patterns, and

statistics that aid business organizations in proactively engaging with
data to implement effective decision-making processes.
Merging Data Analytics and IoT

• Data Analytics has a significant role to play in the growth and success of IoT
applications and investments.

• Analytics tools will allow the business units to make effective use of their datasets
as explained in the points listed below.

• Volume: There are huge clusters of data sets that IoT applications make use of.
• The business organizations need to manage these large volumes of data and need
to analyze the same for extracting relevant patterns.
• These datasets along with real-time data can be analyzed easily and efficiently
with data analytics software.
Merging Data Analytics and IoT
• Structure: IoT applications involve data sets that may have a varied structure as
unstructured, semi-structured and structured data sets.

• There may also be a significant difference in the data formats and types. Data analytics will
allow the business executive to analyze all of these varying sets of data using automated
tools and software.

• Driving Revenue: The use of data analytics in IoT investments will allow the business units
to gain an insight into customer preferences and choices.

• This would lead to the development of services and offers as per the customer demands
and expectations.

• This, in turn, will improve the revenues and profits earned by the organizations.
Merging Data Analytics and IoT
• Competitive Edge: IoT is a buzzword in the current era of technology
and there are numerous IoT application developers and providers
present in the market.

• The use of data analytics in IoT investments will provide a business

unit to offer better services and will, therefore, provide the ability to
gain a competitive edge in the market.
Different types of data analytics
• Streaming Analytics: This form of data analytics is also referred as
event stream processing and it analyzes huge in-motion data sets.

• Real-time data streams are analyzed in this process to detect urgent

situations and immediate actions.

• IoT applications based on financial transactions, air fleet tracking,

traffic analysis etc. can benefit from this method.
Different types of data analytics
• Spatial Analytics: This is the data analytics method that is used to
analyze geographic patterns to determine the spatial relationship
between the physical objects.

• Location-based IoT applications, such as smart parking applications

can benefit from this form of data analytics.
Different types of data analytics
• Time Series Analytics: As the name suggests, this form of data
analytics is based upon the time-based data which is analyzed to
reveal associated trends and patterns.

• IoT applications, such as weather forecasting applications and health

monitoring systems can benefit from this form of data analytics
method.
Different types of data analytics
• Prescriptive Analysis: This form of data analytics is the combination
of descriptive and predictive analysis.

• It is applied to understand the best steps of action that can be taken

in a particular situation.

• Commercial IoT applications can make use of this form of data

analytics to gain better conclusions.
What is IoT Analytics?
• The objective of IoT analytics is to gain value from large volumes of data generated
by devices connected via the Internet of Things (IoT).

• IoT analytics is typically connected to the Industrial IoT (IIoT).

• Organizations use IIoT to collect and analyze data from pipelines, weather
stations, sensors on manufacturing equipment, smart meters, delivery trucks, and
other machinery.

• IoT analytics is also used in retail, data center management, healthcare.

• IoT data is a subset of big data, and is constantly growing in volume, variety and
velocity (the 3Vs model).
What is IoT Analytics?
• It consists of heterogeneous streams that need to be transformed
and combined to produce current, comprehensive and accurate
information for business analysis and reporting.

• Many IoT devices were not developed for compatibility with other
IoT devices and systems.

• IoT data integration is thus complex, as is the analytics that relies on

it.
Types of IoT Analytics

• Descriptive analytics on IoT data

• Diagnostic analytics on IoT data
• Predictive analytics on IoT data
• Prescriptive analytics on IoT data
Descriptive analytics on IoT data
•
Focuses on what’s happening, by monitoring the status of IoT devices, machines, products and assets.

• Determines if things are going as planned, and notifies if anomalies occur.

• Descriptive analytics is generally implemented as dashboards that show current and historical sensor
data, key performance indicators (KPIs), statistics and alerts.

Addresses questions such as:

• Are there any anomalies that demand attention?
• What’s the utilization and throughput of this machine?
• How are consumers using our products?
• Where do my assets reside?
• How many components are we creating with this tool?
• How much energy is this machine using?
Diagnostic analytics on IoT data

• Analyzes IoT data to identify core problems and to fix or improve a service, product or
process.

• Diagnostic capabilities are typically extensions to dashboards that permit users to drill into
data, compare it, and visualize correlations and trends in an ad-hoc manner.

• Many organizations employ domain experts knowledgeable about a specific process,

machine, device or product, rather than data scientists, to perform diagnostics on data.

Addresses questions such as:

• Why is this machine producing more defective parts than other machines?
• Why is this machine consuming excessive energy?
• Why aren’t we producing enough parts with this tool?
• Why are we getting a lot of product returns from American customers?
Predictive analytics on IoT data

• Assesses the likelihood that something will happen within a specific timeframe, according to
historical data.

• The aim is to proactively take corrective action before an undesired outcome occurs, to
mitigate risk, or to isolate opportunities.

• Typically implemented via machine learning models that are trained with historical data, and
stationed on the cloud so that they can be accessed by end-user applications.

Addresses questions such as:

• What’s the likelihood of this machine failing in the next 24 hours?
• What is the anticipated useful life of this tool?
• When should I service this machine?
• What will be the demand for this feature or product?
Prescriptive analytics on IoT data

• Suggests actions based on the result of a prediction or diagnosis, or provides some

visibility to the rationale behind a prediction or diagnostic.

• Recommendations tend to be about how to optimize or fix something.

Addresses questions such as:
• This machine is 80 percent likely to fail in the next 12 hours. How should I prevent
this?
• The overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of this machine is low. How can I improve
it?
• This machine is creating too many defective components. How can I avoid this?
• This design is resulting in too many manufacturing issues. How can I improve it?
3 IoT Analytics Challenges  
1. Too much data
• The total amount of data being collected may be so large that it may not be possible to move
it over the network to a central location.

• Take, for example, a single outside temperature sensor in the warehouse.

• To fulfill its role it transmits data, including temperature, humidity, battery level, software
versions, hardware versions, and motion/position changes.

• Sensors could transmit this information every 30 seconds, and there could be several hundred
of these sensors across the warehouse.

• This may be only one of dozens of sensor types.

3 IoT Analytics Challenges  
2. Security
• It is essential for connected devices to work together for most IoT use cases, but this approach raises
security issues.

• The overall security profile is only as effective as the weakest device.

• If the security on a specific vendor’s outdoor sensor is weak, and the sensor is connected to other
devices, the likelihood of ‘indirect’ critical impact is high.

• Attackers can compromise the sensor and modify its data or exploit the connection to other devices to
cause damage.

• For example, a breached sensor could provide the system with an incorrect outdoor temperature
reading to the system. The system could adjust a zone temperature in a way that destroys the food in
that area.
3 IoT Analytics Challenges  

3. Misbehaving devices
• These are devices or sensors that go bad and begin sending false
readings to the system.

• For example, a low battery, a software bug, or a hardware failure,

could cause such readings.

• This could ruin the inventory of the warehouse.

Data Infrastructure for IoT
IoT Analytics Storage:

• In an IoT architecture, there are thousands of sensors collecting huge volumes of unstructured
data, from clickstream data to video footage.

• Modern data streaming architectures use data lakes like Amazon S3 to store this raw data.

• The benefits of data lakes are that they can grow indefinitely, integrate with many processing and
analytics tools, and provide a relatively low cost of storage.
• To enable analytics on IoT data, organizations need to plan their storage carefully.

• Just dumping data into a data lake with no prior treatment can create a data swamp.

•  Upsolver is a stream processing and data lake management platform that can save IoT data to a
data lake in a format that enables SQL-based analysis by traditional analytics tools.
Data Infrastructure for IoT
• Stream Processing
• Stream processing allows you to analyze continuous data flows in memory, with only
state changes transported to a database or file system.

• This process, called Change Data Capture (CDC), is useful in an IoT setting as it permits
a system to recognize relevant information while removing less useful data points.

• An event stream processor, like Kafka, lets you write logic for each actor, representing
a type of IoT device which is transmitting data, wire the actors up, and connect them
to data sources.

• Connecting the stream processor to large numbers of data sources in an IoT

environment, and managing storage effectively, is a major challenge and requires data
engineering expertise.
Data Infrastructure for IoT
• Analytics Engine
• Several vendors provide purpose-built analytics engines designed to work with
IoT data. You can use one of these solutions, or analyze IoT data directly with
standard analytics tools, like you would any type of big data.
AWS IoT analytics
• AWS IoT analytics transforms, filters and enriches IoT data prior to storing it in
a time-series data store for analysis.
• It collects data from your devices, transforms it into a usable form, enriches
the data with device-specific metadata, and stores the processed data.
• You can then analyze data by initiating ad-hoc or scheduled queries using the
built-in SQL query engine, or run machine learning algorithms on the data.
• AWS IoT analytics includes pre-built models for common IoT use cases like
predictive maintenance and smart agriculture.
Data Infrastructure for IoT
Azure IoT analytics
• Azure Stream Analytics integrates with open source cloud platforms
to provide real time analytics on data from IoT applications and
devices.
Azure IoT analytics allows you to:
• Develop massively parallel Complex Event Processing (CEP) pipelines
• Scale instantly
• Build real-time dashboards
• Guarantee high availability for IoT data
• Create compliance audits