Toward a Global Data Infrastructure

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new class of applications that can benefit from cloud infrastructure. However, directly connecting smart devices to the cloud has a number of disadvantages and is unlikely to keep up with either the growing speed of the IoT or the diverse needs of IoT applications. We explore these disadvantages and argue that fundamental properties of the IoT prevent the current approach from scaling. What is missing is a well-architected system extending functionality of the cloud and providing seamless interplay among the heterogeneous components closer to the edge in the IoT space. We argue that raising the level of abstraction to a data-centric design--focused around the distribution, preservation and protection of information--better matches the IoT. We present early work on such a distributed platform, called the Global Data Plane (GDP), and discuss how it addresses the problems with the cloud-centric architecture.