Introduction to Azure IoT Hubs

Connected things have been around for decades in the manufacturing, utilities, and resources industries and have solved the very real requirement of needing to know and understand how large-scale systems are operating; they have provided the Operational Technology (OT) to the more commonly talked about Information Technology (IT).

An example of such a system is supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). Typically, a SCADA system consists of a large number of networked sensors reporting their data over proprietary protocols to a central resource that displays information and allow the decisions to be made. The data is stored in a large database known as a historian for ongoing analysis. These industrial control systems have existed for many years and are largely secure by default as they isolate the sensors and controls in a private network, for example, a process control network.

Because SCADA systems are largely proprietary or at least based on a few...