The Internet of Things that is all the rage in the digitally-driven world of the early third millennium has come as an embodiment of our eternal dream to make machines serve people without human direction or even intervention. Today, the IoT complexes aren’t only viewed as a network of gizmos that share data among themselves to coordinate their operations. This conventional definition has been recently broadened to include a plethora of systems of record (such as IoT data warehouses) that collect and hoard relevant information to be further used for various purposes.
Another tectonic shift has occurred in our approach to the application domains of the IoT. The orthodox vision of a smart house where pre-programmed devices cook, clean, wash, and shop to cater to the needs and whims of its owner has given way to a more comprehensive picture that includes smart factories and cities being powered and run by state-of-the-art industrial software.
IoT Business Solutions
Nowadays, IoT solutions are employed in a whole gamut of domains.
In agriculture, IoT sensors, cameras, and actuators united by special software help to monitor and report the ripeness of crops, track the level of moisture and temperature of the soil, and control various harvesting equipment, paving the way to the mass advent of robofarming.
In retail, IoT business solution applications have a tremendous potential – from introducing automatic fund debiting when a buyer leaves a shop and providing discount personalization to installing smart shelves that can signal the personnel that the merchandise stock has been depleted.
The financial and banking realm is abuzz with the Bank of Things (BoT) – an IoT spinoff that is called to revolutionize the industry exclusively susceptible to the introduction of fintech solutions. The high demand for the latter is explained by both the prodigious number of workflow processes to be automated and the utmost need for top-level data protection measures provided by contemporary IoT security solutions.
However variegated the application of IoT solutions might be, all the business processes they enable and streamline can’t do without a heavy reliance upon data storage facilities. These come in different guises the most widespread types of which being the database and the data warehouse.
Data Warehouse vs Database: The Difference Made Clear
In the digitalization age, enterprises make extensive use of structured collections of information related to their business processes and customers aka databases. Its chief purpose is recording real-time detailed data for a limited number of further applications. The nature of such CRUD (creating, reading, updating, deleting) operations has earned this information storage type the moniker of online transaction processing (OLTP) database – a garden variety necessary for the successful functioning of any organization.
Only a decade ago, most OLTP databases were kept on the on-premise hardware whereas the latest headways in the IT-sphere enable setting up virtual depositories which spells hydrating the cloud. Such migration inaugurates not only new venues for data storage but greater opportunities for data processing as well. It can be done within an IoT data warehouse.
Being honed for implementing analytical operations, data warehouses are termed online analytical processing (OLAP) databases. Their three-tier architecture allows multi-dimensional data representation somewhat similar to several Excel tables combined. This structural organization greatly facilitates any analytical endeavor, enabling users to shuttle between dimensions and examine information in all aspects from all possible vantage points.
Adoption of this model promises a number of boons to business owners.
What Is the Ultimate Outcome of a Data Warehouse?
Among the weightiest benefits of the data warehouse are:
1. Universality
Whatever the nature of your business and the symptomatic workflow are, the analytical capabilities of the data warehouse can be leveraged in all departments and use cases – from sales and marketing to risk management.
2. Time-saving
Instead of analyzing the performance of each sector piecemeal, the IoT data warehouse allows implementing across-the-board analytical mechanisms, which spells standardization and tremendous reduction of total turnaround time spent for it.
3. Bolstered Business Intelligence
Since all coal-and-ice dossiers are kept in one virtual place, developing insights into clients’ activities and internal operations is drastically enhanced.
4. Easier Forecasting
Exposing critical trends in all analyzed processes of your iot business solutions serves as a solid ground for shaping forecasts as to the customer behavior and oncoming market developments in the niche. With such forecasts handy, mapping out your business strategies becomes a cakewalk.
5. Well-Judged Decision-Making
Observing persistent patterns behind individual data items is only the first phase. At stage two, this rich collection of historical data from all available sources must be leveraged to produce competent decisions that will augment the efficiency of the organization.
6. Increasing Revenues
Whatever measures a firm implements, their ultimate goal is to step up ROI. Due to its impressive analytical powers, the data warehouse is a second-to-none revenue booster able to bring a fresh stream of profits into your company’s coffers.
Conclusion
An intense introduction of the IoT practices (such as a data warehouse) is what will shape the face of many industries for years to come, giving a competitive edge to organizations that managed to hop on the bandwagon. Axisbits offers high-end Internet of Things development services that will help you to keep abreast of modern technological advancements without making a hole in your pocket.
