Azure IoT Cloud enabled for Cisco Fog deployments
Fri 26 May 2017
Microsoft has announced a partnership with Cisco, to enable the Azure IoT suite to connect and interoperate with Cisco Fog deployments.
The announcement, made at the Cisco IoT World Forum in London, is intended to extend the strengths of the Azure Cloud IoT Suite to the edge, to maximize IoT utility for clients of both companies.
Connecting Azure to Cisco Fog is intended to benefit joint customers by allowing them to build and host applications for IoT devices in the Azure Cloud environment, then to extend those applications to the edge with Cisco Fog.
IoT at the edge brings intelligence and processing capabilities physically closer to the devices originating important data, so that clients can grow closer to real-time data analysis and decision making. It can also help to optimize network traffic and IoT cost-effectiveness, as some results can be processed at the edge, and only information that is necessary is forwarded to the cloud.
IoT applications also often perform better at the edge, as many are intolerant of latency, which is reduced by moving data analysis to the source rather than performing analysis at a remote cloud or data center.
As stated in the Microsoft blog post, “Cloud is a natural place to manage IoT devices, to collect data from them, gain insights using analytics and then operationalize those insights. Edge is a natural place to collect, optimize and react to data with low latency based on the insights generated in the cloud. In this way, cloud and edge work together to help IoT reach its full potential.”
The partnership with Cisco follows last week’s announcement of Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, a cross-platform offering that extends the Azure IoT Suite to cover both edge and cloud computing requirements. The Microsoft IoT Edge, which is available for both Windows and Linux operating systems, enables clients to deploy Azure machine learning, stream analytics and cognitive services to benefit IoT applications at the edge.
As part of this spring’s edge upgrades for Azure customers, Microsoft also recently made Azure Stream Analytics available on edge devices as a new feature. Stream Analytics at the Edge allows customers to run real-time analytics on multiple data streams, to maximize the performance of edge applications and data analysis.
