A combination of effective IoT, Cloud and private-network solutions can enhance your company’s workflows, making it easier to remotely control and reboot equipment, as well as monitor and manage the performance of various points of presence while off-site.
The use-cases for the communication technology that IoT offers encompasses a wide variety of industries – from public services, mining and manufacturing, to the medical and financial fields. Navigating the complicated jargon and figuring out which solution you require can be a challenge, however.
Netshield is a specialist provider of tailor-made end-to-end IoT and Cloud based products and services. Its engineering teams possess the skills to ascertain which elements would help you streamline your business, and to customise, structure, and maintain these systems on your behalf.
Netshield’s customisable set of IoT and Cloud products will ensure that your company’s systems are optimised for peak productivity and minimal downtime.
Netshield Services include;
· Wan based and IoT – Application Cloud software including UI dashboards.
· Hardware and device firmware research and development.
· URS drafting, generation and finalization of user requirement specifications.
· Gateway, sensor and solution customization as per client requirements.
· Integration of third-party devices and sensors into a customized point of presence services and application solutions.
· Intelligent process definitions and implementation of convergence gateways.
· Stream analytics and database management.
· User interface development with limited analytics.
· Onward alerting services through email, Telegram, Slack and text messaging.
· Energy consumption, planning and power backup systems.
· Call centre automation.
Netshield IoT Cloud Platform
Netshield’s products provide accurate real-time environmental monitoring and control, power level tracking and alerts to your immediate location.
The user friendly Netshield IoT/IIoT Cloud and VM platform was initially developed as a cloud Computing service provider agnostic platform and is constantly updated and maintained to ensure optimal cloud/IoT or private network monitoring performance. This ensures that our clients can seamlessly migrate to and or from a private-network application or between various cloud service providers and that services can be shared over multiple cloud computing service provider platforms.
The Platform was created and is deployed on Docker Containers and Kubernetes, with NoSQL Altas Mongo database storage services, Redis Cache and Grafana as live application monitoring tool. Full in-service upgradeability and maintenance are ensured through the utilization of Helm and CI/CD services, allowing live transparent upgradeability without any user intervention.
The REST API’s, default JSON format, interface seamlessly to other platforms allowing flexible data digestion and ease of ingress and egress dataflow. Identity services is provided, supporting Auth 2.0 and OpenID, and core access (Secret Vault) and security layers ensure secure user access to the platform. These tools give the user a secure and complete overview of the information stored and relayed in their IoT ecosystem via user-friendly dashboards. The API interfaces link seamlessly into manager-of-manager (MoM) and ticketing products to ensure holistic view of the entire network and peripheral networks.
Conveniently, onward alerting services Telegram, Slack, Email and SMS ensure optimised onward alerting messaging as individualised personal or group alerting. The onward alerting services normally include Uniform Resource Locator (URL) links to ensure quick through-linking to the exact point of presence indicative dashboard where the alert was triggered. This ensures that users are always informed, even when they are not located at their monitoring stations where alert popup messages alert them of events.
All statuses, events and alerts are stored either on a local server/VM or in the cloud for analytics. Automated weekly and monthly status reports can be generated from the system.
Netshield Intelligent Point of Presence (iPoP) IoT Sensor Convergence Gateways
Netshield has designed and maintains various cost-effective Intelligent GSM, Wireless and Wired ethernet IoT/Cloud convergence point-of-presence gateways, these gateways are always fitted with;
· a feeding utility power presence monitoring sensor,
· a rechargeable backup battery and
· battery status indicator
to ensure that critical events can be relayed during power failures and interruptions.
The Netshield iPoP gateways have the capability of managing the use of out-of-band bandwidth, in the GSM (2G/3G/4G/LTE), LoRa and SigFOX space. This functionally allows users to minimize the use of expensive bandwidth utilization by configuring the PoP Gateways in ether a ‘Status-event-alert mode’ or ‘True IoT mode’.
In the ‘True IoT mode’, the gateways are not sensitive to bandwidth utilization and relay sensor samples as regularly as possible, this reporting interval can also be user defined. In the ‘status-event-alert mode’ the user configures the types of occurrences in ether status or event or alert modes, determined by criticality and trigger-levels of each sensor. Then the user selects the preferred reporting period for each type of occurrence to minimize the bandwidth used.
The iPoP Gateways have user-definable multilevel triggered and scalable reporting intervals. This is functionally defined like that of a traffic robot, allowing users to scale/define the volume of reporting – critical to application where the cost of data is a factor.
· ‘Green or Status’ occurrence, when the connected sensors statuses are within acceptable user-definable ranges. The gateway will send an all good/presence heartbeat once a day (default), this can be scaled to as frequently as every 10-minutes.
· ‘Orange or Event’ occurrence, when any of the connected sensors statues move into the user-definable low/medium-risk sensing range, the gateway will report all-sensors current values every 2-minutes (default). This can be scaled from every 2- to 120-minutes.
· ‘Red or Alert’ occurrence, when any of the connected sensors move into a user-definable high-risk sensing range, the gateway will report all sensor values every 30-seconds (default). This interval can be scaled from every 30-seconds to 30-minutes.
· Threshold hysteresis is integrated at each trigger level to ensure a lagging effect at these points to eliminate trigger point flapping.
The local terminal session embedded within the iPoP gateways enable local communications, through serial port, that can connect and locally communicate to point of presence equipment like UPS’s, Generators, Energy-meters, Fire-panels, CRAC-systems (AirCon), BMS, Access-control and media equipment like CT-scan and X-ray equipment.
These local session extract information from the above mentioned systems and repackages the information in to IoT protocol and only Events and Alerts are relayed to the managing cloud or server platform.
The gateways are constantly being upgraded to ensure that we meet ever-changing requirements.
Netshield Data collecting sensors
Netshield sells a wide variety of in-house and 3rd party integrated sensors for holistic data collection. For environmental management and control, Netshield boasts a range of essential locally developed and internationally sourced sensors. These include:
- Temperature and Humidity
- Class I AC Energy metering
- DC metering and battery monitoring
- Fire detection and suppression modules and brackets
- Gas detection and air quality
- Gas Pressure
- Seismic and vibration
- Fluid level indicators
- Fluid presence (water, petrol chemical and alkali)
- Air and Liquid flow and rate metering (water, petrol chemical and alkali)
- Access controllers (Biometric, RFID, Keypad)
- Load Cells
- Indicative light and sounding Beacons
- Noise exposure
- Proximity, IR, Movement, Motion, Accelerometer and Magnetic Inertia
- Wind speed and direction
- Pyrometer and photodetection
- Locking mechanisms
Cloud and Server User Interface Dashboards
Left: Typical Landing Page Above: Typical Configuration Dashboard
Below: Typical History Dashboard Below: Typical Device View
Process of Adding New Products and Services
Catered for your unique requirements
Netshield undertakes a three-step process to ensure that you receive the best possible, customised solution. This includes elaborate research and development before user onboarding is undertaken.
With Netshield as your business’s partner in IoT, you will save valuable time and resources, as you won’t need your employees to monitor and manage each of your points of presence from the ground.
· Research – Quick to market PoC integration service of IoT point-of-presence gateway/device/sensor integration onto NS Cloud Instances with database structuring and onward alert messaging. This includes a quick start study and 3rd-party OEM information onboarding check.
· Development – During this process the PoC application code, and where needed, embedded firmware code, is productized with in-depth structured integration of the fully packaged product. The entire services package, from point-of-presence through to database capture, user interfaces, API’s and onward alert messaging, is qualified with all related products and services. All preliminary research code is finalized and qualified including take-on services, user dashboards and user administration are finalized according to agreed final URS (User Requirement Specification). Release of final specifications, installation procedure, user manuals, as-built-documentation and training procedures.
· User Onboarding – Implement the user-onboarding process and linking information into the application and database for centralized upkeeping. Stored information must be centralized, and applicable services must be contained in the applicable environments.
Process of Adding Additional Services or Changing Services on Qualified Products
Change Control – Process of implementing changes and enhancements to the ‘Developed Solution’ and finalized products.