5 Ways Google Is Looking For An Edge Over Competition With Its Cloud IoT Core Platform

Google's Launches Public Beta Release Of IoT Platform

Google on Wednesday launched the public beta release of its IoT Core a fully managed service, which was first announced in private beta in May as a tool that manages connected edge devices ingesting data.

The company added new features that ensure device secure connectivity and manageability at scale for end users.

"Cloud IoT Core is now publicly available to all users in beta, and we have introduced new set of features in this release. With Cloud IoT Core, you can easily connect and centrally manage millions of globally dispersed IoT devices," Indranil Chakraborty, Product Manager at Google Cloud, told CRN. "We're very excited for this announcement… the goal is to make sure that the platform is a win-win situation for partners and enterprise customers."

Here are five ways that Google's new Cloud IoT Core is set up to succeed against competition in the IoT arena.

Device Key

Cloud IoT Core now has an array of new security features on the device side, so that private beta users can now verify the ownership of their device keys.

Customers can now bring their own device key signed by a Certificate Authority, and IoT Core can verify that signature using this certificate during the authentication process – giving them more device visibility and management.

"We wanted to enhance the security for our customers, so now the device key is owned by the customer," said Chakraborty.

Secure Connectivity Over HTTP

To add to its security features around its platform, Google has also added secure connectivity over HTTP, in addition to the standard MQTT protocol, to help customers securely connect existing IoT devices and gateways into the IoT platform at scale.

"Our new release has support for HTTP, and if you have other devices with enough power we have native support for that as well," said Chakraborty.

Logical Device Representation

Google has added other features to its platform as well – IoT Core now has logical device representation, which gives customers further visibility into their IoT devices' state and properties – even when the devices are not connected.

Customers will get a logical representation of a physical IoT device, through APIs for their applications to retrieve and update the device properties.

"Simple" Pricing

To better keep up with the massive amount of data exchanged on IoT Core, Google has also unveiled a "simple pricing plan" where customers can register as many IoT devices as they want and pay only when those devices connect to and exchange data with Cloud IoT Core.

The pricing plan includes a free tier that lets users try the service at no cost for the first 250MB of data volume of the month.

After that, Google offers three standard tiers of pricing – including a tier that allows 250MB to 250GB monthly that will cost a little less than half a cent per MB; a tier that enables 250GB to 5TB per month that will costs .20 cents per MB; and a tier that is for 5TB of data or above per month that costs .045 cents per MB.

Partnerships

Chakraborty said that Google is extending its partnerships around IoT in two areas: hardware and applications.

The company will work on the hardware side with embedded vendors so that hardware gateways can work seamlessly with Google Cloud IoT Core. This includes working with partners like Intel, NXP and others. On the application side, the company is working with companies that can build applications for vertical-specific use cases

"We want to continue working with partners because at the end of the day, for any enterprise customer can build a complex solution they need to work with companies on the hardware side, with ISVs, and with cloud platforms – you need all the ingredients," he said.