Global deployment
Expanding smart manufacturing globally is complex. Challenges include purchasing servers, ensuring network speed, and maintaining the stability of a massive number of online devices. You also need to integrate with multiple voice platforms, handle localization for many languages, and meet various security standards. The IoT Platform provides a global deployment solution to address these challenges. This solution significantly reduces development and maintenance costs for manufacturers and helps Chinese smart manufacturing companies expand worldwide.
Introduction to the global activation center
The IoT Platform is built on Alibaba Cloud's global nodes and supports device connectivity in over 200 countries and regions. Its underlying architecture can scale to support more than 10 billion device connections, allowing customers to integrate massive numbers of smart devices worldwide.
To reduce the management cost of flashing device certificates, the IoT Platform has upgraded its global capabilities. After the upgrade, you no longer need to specify a sales region during the flashing process. Once a device certificate is flashed, the device can be sold in any region globally.
The following figure illustrates how the global activation center works. When a device connects to the network for activation, it initially connects to the China (Shanghai) data center. After this initial activation, the platform automatically routes the device to the nearest data center based on the end user's location. Currently, data centers are available in China (Shanghai), Singapore, US (Virginia), and Germany (Frankfurt). More data centers are being added.
Compliance
The platform meets the compliance requirements of global customers for Alibaba Cloud services.
- The IoT Platform has implemented privacy protection and data security measures to comply with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These technical solutions help ensure that products built on the platform are GDPR compliant.
- The platform has passed the SOC 1 and SOC 2 audits, which are based on standards established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).
Multiple languages
To support the global sales of devices, the IoT Platform provides features in multiple languages.
IoT Platform currently supports 24 languages, including Chinese (zh-CN), English (en-US), French (fr-FR), German (de-DE), Japanese (ja-JP), Korean (ko-KR), Spanish (es-ES), Russian (ru-RU), Italian (it-IT), Hindi (hi-IN), Portuguese (pt-PT), Polish (pl-PL), Dutch (nl-NL), Danish (da-dk), Czech (cs-CZ), Slovak (sk-SK), Swedish (sv-SE), Traditional Chinese (zh-Hant), Turkish (tr-TR), Hungarian (hu-HU), Vietnamese (vi-VN), Indonesian (in-ID), Arabic (ar-SA), and Thai (th-TH).
Support for integration with third-party platforms outside China
The Voice Service of the IoT Platform has been upgraded. On the page, you can quickly integrate with third-party platforms. For more information, see Voice Service overview.
The IoT Platform's Public App is integrated with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and IFTTT. The platform also provides solutions for integrating your own branded apps with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. For integration instructions, see the following documents.