Why do we use commercial IIoT platforms?

Why should we use commercial IIoT platforms? Why should we use the cloud? The answer is clear— commercial IIoT platforms are cost-effective and mature platforms that provide excellent levels of productivity, fast development, deployment automation (DevOps), reliability, availability, and auto scalability. However, there are some reasons why we might want to avoid them—for instance, if we need a high level of data protection and control of exports, if we need high flexibility for custom integration and proprietary protocols, or if we would like to avoid dependencies to a specific vendor.

All these issues can be mitigated or resolved, but the choice to adopt a particular platform depends on several factors. The following figure shows a simple decision-making diagram:

Figure 9.1 – Workflow to choose between cloud versus on-premises solutions

First, we need to check whether we have any restrictions...