Although the internet of things is already in our everyday lives — from wearables and smart watches to intelligent home appliances — it still presents challenges for enterprises that want to scale devices up and use data to leverage insights.

Aware of these challenges, Amazon Web Services Inc. made more than a handful of announcements about new IoT services during its three-week AWS re:Invent virtual event this year. The idea is to enable businesses to securely connect and manage devices, collect and analyze device data, and build and deploy solutions that unlock business value, according to Dirk Didascalou (pictured), vice president of IoT at AWS.

“You need to somehow manage complexity from embedded software, hardware, fleet management, cloud capabilities, AI,” he said. “It’s really, really complex if you try to master this yourself. So that’s why we try to integrate our offerings.”

Didascalou spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how devices data fuels an organization’s ability to leverage actionable insights, the capabilities of AWS’ new IoT offerings, and how these solutions can solve business problems. (* Disclosure below.)

Sensors allow large-scale monitoring

Among the new capabilities announced during re:invent is the AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN, which enables enterprises to connect wireless devices that use low-power, long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) technology without developing or operating a LoRaWAN Network Server themselves. They just need to acquire a specific gateway that is already certified in the AWS Service Catalog, according to Didascalou.

“It’s long range, so that means you can put sensors pretty far away and penetrate also concrete or basements,” he explained. “So, if you think about asset tracking or large-scale monitoring of sensors, LoRaWAN is the standard.”

For example, the temperature monitoring company ComplianceMate uses the solution to connect temperature sensors in restaurant refrigeration and freezer units to ensure customer food safety, reduce risk of food perishing, and enable its customers to monitor and maintain compliance with food safety regulations.

“LoRaWAN, because it’s a low frequency, it can actually penetrate concrete quite a bit,” Didascalou said. “And because it sends very low data rates … and uses very little battery, they can put the sensor in all of the refrigeration units and in all the restaurants and you don’t have to touch them for years to come.”

To help enterprises monitor a large and growing amount of IoT devices, AWS announced Fleet Hub, a feature that allows customers to easily create a fully managed web application to view and interact with their IoT device fleets.

“They see if something is wrong, can identify issues, and they can also do remediations, like maybe reboot a device or make a firmware update or security tunnel into a more complicated device for troubleshooting,” Didascalou explained.

For industrial customers, in particular, AWS developed the SiteWise Edge, software that runs at industrial sites and makes it easier to collect, organize, process and monitor equipment data on-premises before sending it to the cloud. The problem that this solves is that in many cases, organizations do not want or even can’t send all of the data to the cloud, so they need a way to process it at the edge, even when disconnected, according to Didascalou.

“It’s the same capabilities that you have in the cloud, which now can run on gateways, on Outposts, on Snow devices, which is a data ingestion, data modeling, ETL metrics calculation,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE