Building multi-tenant solutions with Azure IoT Central
Published Sep 09 2021 01:30 PM 12.2K Views
Microsoft

In just minutes, scale your IoT solutions from one customer to many with organizations in IoT Central, the new, easy way to extend your solutions while maintaining flexible access control.

 

Scale your IoT solutions beyond a single tenant—simply and securely. Organizations, a new feature from IoT Central helps customers control and manage access to devices, users, and experiences—in an interface as familiar as folder management.  

 

Depiction of an IoT project’s organization structure with three customers and a few sub-customers/departmentsDepiction of an IoT project’s organization structure with three customers and a few sub-customers/departments

Because most IoT solution architectures today consist of a single cloud ingestion endpoint, scaling for multiple tenants is challenging. Currently, customers either spin up an instance of their IoT solution for each customer, or ingest all the data through a single endpoint, applying access control at the application layer. Both approaches increase the management overhead and create opportunities for security breaches. Organizations makes it easier to build, maintain and extend your IoT solution without additional work – or new vulnerabilities.

 

 

An organization can represent an entity, a physical location, or your organizational structure. Once configured, devices and experiences – like dashboards, device groups, and jobs – are assigned to an organization. Invited users can access one or more organizations in the application – each with a different role, if desired. The application administrator manages devices across all organizations – ensuring end users see only the devices and experiences they’re authorized to access.

 

Left: Administrator view showing all devices in their solution.  Right: End user with access to only one organization showing only a subset of the devices in the IoT solution.Left: Administrator view showing all devices in their solution. Right: End user with access to only one organization showing only a subset of the devices in the IoT solution.

 

The ability to define organizations opens up a new approach to implement IoT Central for large scale environments”, said Bernard Lenssens, Founder of Codit, a solution integrator with a strong focus on Azure IoT and Edge and an early adopter of organizations in IoT Central. Lenssens adds that “this new feature has been the missing piece to unlock certain types of projects. It allows customers to simplify complexity, gain velocity and lower costs when building multi-tenant solutions.”

 

John Rogan, President of CEI, an IT/Technology consultant and services provider, and another early adopter, is using organizations to help a client “monitor and control HVAC and lighting at sites spread over the U.S., ensuring that users can only monitor sites assigned to them.”

 

An organization structure in IoT Central with three organizations and some sub-organizations.An organization structure in IoT Central with three organizations and some sub-organizations.

 

Ready to start using organizations?
Existing customers can head to Administration > Organizations in the IoT Central app. Read more about configuring organizations.

 

Still haven’t tried IoT Central?
See how Fortune 500 companies are using Azure to invent with purpose. Visit www.azureiotcentral.com to start your 7-day free trial.

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‎Sep 09 2021 11:46 AM
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