Now you can use IoT Central as a multi-tenant hub
Azure IoT Central now supports multi-tenant. What does this mean? It means that you as the application administrator can now manage your devices, device groups, and users under different organizations. This gives you the ability to either segment off portions of your organization or allow multiple organizations to use the same IoT Central application.
Azure IoT Central now supports multi-tenant. Segment your organization or allow multiple organizations to use your app.
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What does this look like practically?
Customers in this scenario are looking for an IoT platform that allows them to provide a factory view to device managers and operators that is local to that factory. For instance, a factory operator at the West plant only sees their devices, device groups, and users. However, an administrator has visibility into all plant activity. The old way to make this work in IoT Central was to template the app and release multiple versions of it, or to use device groups as a means of organizing devices that belong to a different location. Now you can build the application once, and invite multiple locations or organizations to the application. This can also make IoT Central a manage services platform.
How is this done in IoT Central?
Devices continue to send their IoT data to a central endpoint, but on the cloud the data is segmented based on organizations.
There are three concepts at play:
- Organizations – conceptually, it’s a container or folder where you send your device data
- Organizations – allow for parent child relationships – parent company and child companies
- Users – you assign users and their role or context to that organization
Personally, I’m excited about the opportunities that this offers platform developers. Smaller and mid-sized factories could share the same app and platform, but segment their data by building, zones, or even machines. This allows local operators the ability to focus on the data that is meaningful to them.