Last week, Google announced it would shut down its IoT Core service. While Google ended its operations, Microsoft is now taking active steps to integrate its IoT and edge computing teams and services more closely with its cloud platform, Azure.
Microsoft plans to merge its IoT/edge with the company’s hybrid management service Azure Arc, Azure Stack, its device family and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) products, and Azure Edge Zones, its 5G-connected cloud services available from edge facilities.
The merger will enable the company to pitch edge devices as being manageable from Azure around the world.
Aside from ensuring better Azure integration, Microsoft is striving to bring cross-service and cross-device security into its IoT offerings.
Microsoft already has a number of IoT offerings, including Azure IoT Hub, a service for connecting, monitoring and managing IoT assets; Azure Digital Twins, which uses “spatial intelligence” to model physical environments; Azure IoT Edge, which brings analytics to edge computing devices; and Azure IoT Central, Windows for IoT, which allows users to develop edge solutions with Microsoft tools.
The sources for this piece include an article in ZDNet.