What Is An IoT Gateway
With the evolution in the last few years for IoT, IIoT and Industry 4.0; there is a significant increase of companies offering and hiring Cloud Services for Industry Automation application.
Some of these services provide solutions like OEM, HMIs, KPIs, BI, Reporting, Notification, Machine to Machine, Machine Learning, and so on…
All these services are great because they base their business and cost on volume economies, which at the end makes the final user have to invest less money on this type of system.
But… all these kinds of online services need to gather data from the Plant Floor. Because you can’t simply go and connect your plant control devices to the internet, industrial users need some sort of agent in the plant who can collect the data and send it over to the cloud systems.
It could be the case you use Amazon IoT (AWS), Azure IoT, Google Cloud or any other cloud services you will always need a local application that help you get the data.
This is what an IoT Gateway is; a piece of software or a hardware which main function will be to get the data from the plant floor, ready devices like sensors, PLCs, Controllers, Power Meters, DCSs, Data Bases, SCADAs, HMIs, RTUs, among many others, convert that data to Cloud Friendly protocols like REST, MQTT or OPC UA and send it over to the cloud application.
