Google Cloud IoT Core wants to manage your device data

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The platform has entered public beta with enhanced features compared to the launch iteration

A collection of IoT devices

Google is attempting to change the way businesses monitor and manage IoT devices with the introduction of Cloud IoT Core in public beta, built to bring IoT data and insights together in one place.

The latest release of Google Cloud IoT Core is now available to those that have signed up to the trial, helping businesses connect and centrally manage all their IoT devices from one dashboard, at scale, wherever they may reside.

This data can then be turned into actionable insights using Google's suite of IoT services including Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google BigQuery, and Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

"At Google I/O, we introduced Google Cloud IoT Core, a fully managed service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to help securely connect and manage IoT devices at scale," Indranil Chakraborty, product manager at Google Cloud said. "Since then, many customers across industries such as transportation, oil and gas, utilities, healthcare and ride-sharing have used the service and provided us with insightful feedback."

What is the Internet of Things (IoT)? How to develop IoT apps Where is the IoT being deployed?

New features in the latest iteration include the ability for businesses to "Bring your own IoT certificate", allowing them to manage their own device key signed by their Certificate Authority (CA). Cloud IoT Core will verify the signature, provisioning them all at once. This authentication is then transferred with the device public keys to Cloud IoT Core.

Another new addition to the platform is a secure connection to existing IoT devices and gateways using HTTP as well as MQTT. The final new addition is logical device representation, which communicates the last state and properties of an IoT device, providing APIs for applications to update the device properties even when it's not connected.

"Our devices are heavily used and constantly send us a huge volume of data," John Heard, Group CTO of Google Cloud IoT Core customer Smart Parking said. "By connecting these devices to Cloud IoT Core, we have a secure and reliable way to not only ingest that data but then also use it to gain valuable insights. We know exactly how our systems are performing and can push updates to devices to ensure we deliver the best products and services as cost effectively as possible."

Clare Hopping
Clare Hopping
Freelance writer

Clare is the founder of Blue Cactus Digital, a digital marketing company that helps ethical and sustainability-focused businesses grow their customer base.

Prior to becoming a marketer, Clare was a journalist, working at a range of mobile device-focused outlets including Know Your Mobile before moving into freelance life.

As a freelance writer, she drew on her expertise in mobility to write features and guides for ITPro, as well as regularly writing news stories on a wide range of topics.