The term IoT cloud platform is used for the cloud platforms that provide very specific services, protocol support, and web-based tools for IoT applications. In more informal terms, these cloud IoT platforms can be used to upload your sensor data and access them from anywhere using the Internet. With these basic features, they also provide tools to access, visualize, and process your sensor data on various platforms such as computers and smartphones. Examples of similar IoT cloud platforms include Xively (http://www.xively.com), 2lemetry (http://www.2lemetry.com), Carriots (http://www.carriots.com), ThingSpeak (http://thingspeak.com), and so on.

The following figure shows the architecture of an IoT system with an Arduino-based sensor system that is sending data to a cloud platform, while a computation unit is accessing the data remotely from the cloud:

Xively, being the oldest and most popular IoT platform, has a large amount of community-based online help that is available...