Or rather, the company has finally announced the general availability of Azure IoT Central, its software as a service solution for working with the Internet of Things.
Microsoft shared the good news here.
Revealing that customers can expect a range of capabilities to be provided by this new offering, ranging from quick onboarding of new devices to powerful options for gaining insights and interpreting their data without the need to have high proficiency with IoT solutions.
As an example, it is now possible to connect new devices with zero-touch provisioning using the Device Provisioning Service.
Bulk device management capabilities are also on offer, without the need to reboot, reset or update services. This is all done on the scale expected in IoT scenarios, with the ability to target a specific device or a group of devices.
Azure IoT Central also provides reliable analytics that help users gain a better understanding of data with minimum configuration. Microsoft even offers a PowerBI solution that works directly here.
Microsoft has built Azure IoT Central on top of Azure IoT Hub, its platform as a service for creating reliable and secure bidirectional communications between IoT devices and cloud solutions — the solution is very much similar to Google Cloud IoT and AWS IoT.
The goal of this fully managed SaaS offering being to allow customers and partners to enable powerful IoT scenarios without requiring cloud solutions expertise.
Azure IoT Central is, essentially, a low-code approach to designing, developing, configuring and maintaining IoT devices. It also provides out-of-the-box security, scalability, as well as integration with processes and applications.
Together with the general availability announcement, Microsoft has also adjusted the pricing of Azure IoT Central to be more down sloping. Working with a small number of devices is now also free.
Give this new service a look here.
