Consulting on a Multi-Tenant IIoT PaaS to Ensure Smooth Platform Launch

Summary

A European IT services provider wanted to launch a Platform-as-a-Service that would let users build industrial IoT applications quickly and without coding, but it lacked the in-house IoT expertise to lay the technical foundation. INNERLUXES provided IoT consulting — capturing the vision as requirements, assessing risks, and designing a vendor-neutral, hybrid on-premises and cloud architecture across platform, tenant, and service levels — and handed over an architecture design and requirements specification to build the PaaS on.

About the Client

The Client is a European provider of IT consulting and infrastructure services. It establishes and optimizes IT infrastructures for organizations, primarily in the industrial sector.

Launching an IIoT PaaS Without In-House IoT Expertise

To help organizations move forward with their digital transformation, the Client decided to launch a Platform-as-a-Service that would let users build relevant industrial IoT (IIoT) applications quickly and without coding. However, the Client did not have enough IoT expertise for the project and was looking for an experienced IoT consulting partner to lay the groundwork for the PaaS development.

Requirements, a Risk Strategy, and a Vendor-Neutral Architecture

An INNERLUXES team of a business analyst, a project manager, a solution architect, and a DevOps consultant joined the project. They ran a series of meetings with the Client to capture the vision for the future PaaS and translate it into requirements. Two architectural priorities stood out: a hybrid deployment with components hosted both on-premises and in the cloud, and no dependence on any single cloud services vendor. Working from that vision, INNERLUXES:

• Prepared high-level project assumptions, evaluated high-level risks, and drafted a risk management strategy.
• Defined detailed functional, security, performance, deployment, and configuration requirements and captured them in a requirements specification.
• Designed the architecture for the IIoT PaaS and prepared software deployment schemes, structured across platform, tenant, and service levels.
• Based the design on open-source technologies and allowed for deployment to different cloud providers, including AWS and Microsoft Azure.

A PaaS Architecture and Requirements Spec to Build On

The Client received a PaaS architecture design document and a system requirements specification that lay the groundwork for the IIoT PaaS development, and plans to continue the cooperation with INNERLUXES on the project.

Methodologies

Q&A sessions, functional decomposition, business requirements analysis.