Microsoft Azure, Cisco team up to simplify IoT deployments
Microsoft Azure and Cisco this week announced a new partnership aimed at helping customers speed up their Internet of Things deployments. Cisco's IoT network devices will be pre-integrated with software that connects directly to the Azure IoT Hub, the fully-managed cloud service that connects IoT devices.
More specifically, Cisco's IoT gateways will use Cisco Edge Intelligence software to connect to the Azure IoT Hub and its Device Provisioning Services to simplify device provisioning and management at scale. IT and operations teams will be able to set up telemetry data pipelines to the IoT Hub with industry-standard protocols like OPC-Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) and Modbus. Once that data is in the hub, teams can use services like Azure Stream Analytics or Azure Machine Learning to build IoT applications.
Microsoft said in its blog post that this should "kickstart" Azure IoT application development, given that customers can leverage their existing Cisco networks by adding Azure IoT-ready gateways.
In a blog post, Cisco said it has plans to expand its Azure IoT integration to other areas.
With the growing power of compute and networking devices, organizations are looking to harness more data from the edge. According to Gartner, 75 percent of enterprise data will be generated at the edge by 2025.