Cross-Cutting Architectural Concerns

In the last two steps, we looked at different kinds of subsystems. In this step, we’re going to analyse the cross-cutting architectural concerns of IoT applications.

Multiple cross-cutting needs are critical for the success of IoT applications, including:

1. Security: Security is a critical consideration in each of the subsystems. Protecting IoT solutions requires secure provisioning of devices, secure connectivity between devices, edge devices and the cloud, secure access to backend solutions, and secure data protection in the cloud during processing and storage (encryption at rest).

2. Logging and monitoring: Logging actions and monitoring IoT application activity is critical for determining system uptime and troubleshooting failures.

3. High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR): This focuses on ensuring an IoT system is always available, including when failures result in disasters. The technology used in IoT subsystems has different failover and cross-region support characteristics.

For IoT applications, this can result in hosting duplicate services and duplicating application data across regions depending on acceptable failover downtime and data loss.

Let’s move on to the next step where we’ll explore data flow processing.