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What is an IoT Gateway?
An IoT gateway is a device that connects physical equipment and assets to the cloud; put simply, gateways are what connect real devices to the digital world!
When we’re looking at an industrial digitalisation journey and beginning to plan the monitoring of assets, be that energy consumption, temperature, humidity, or any other real-world sensor data output, we need to get that information from the asset to the cloud and ultimately into the Hark Platform. The key to this? A gateway!
Why Do I Need Gateways?
Our mission is to gain and increase visibility and control of assets for our clients, which means we must send real-time, reliable asset data to the cloud 24 hours a day.
Our gateways are a super discrete, built-for-purpose, physical device that connects to any asset you’re looking to monitor and manage, from solar panels to ice cream freezers!
Industry-agnostic protocols such as Modbus and BACnet allow us to get that super important, business-critical data straight into your custom dashboard and many assets can be connected to just the one gateway.
Our gateway then does its job by streaming real-time data to the cloud, giving you the power of true operational insight at your fingertips!
To put that into some perspective, for Sainsbury’s, we’ve installed Hark Gateways to over 40 different asset groups in stores!
This means the client’s dashboard will be served with over 2 million readings per day, per store. This is everything from energy demand and power quality to voltage information, providing energy-usage pattern insight and flagging those energy-hungry assets in real-time.
Gateways on the Edge
The Hark gateway runs on the edge. You may have heard of the term edge computing, and although it was conceived in the 90’s, edge computing is really coming into its own with specific regard to industrial IoT.
Monitoring your entire estate means a lot of devices and assets, and a lot of sensors sending a gigantic amount of data to the cloud in real time. Never before have we seen such a data-rich way of working but with all that information being sent, bandwidth is becoming a real premium.
Edge computing brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed, such as in store or on premises at a production facility, this improves response times and saves bandwidth. We work with specialised chips within edge devices rather than sending data to the cloud gaining time and cost efficiencies.
To learn more, get in touch with our team. We will happily discuss it until the cows come home 🐮
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