Using new technologies, simple devices become intelligent things that communicate with their surroundings. Using sensors and additional, external data sources, they collect information about their condition and their environment and interact with other networked things through the Cloud.

The Industrial Internet of Things consists of "things", physical devices such as sensors, actuators, controllers and gateways that gather, send or receive huge amounts of data. The transfer of data and the analysis of the collected information forces the conventional IT infrastructure in companies to their knees and puts them under massive pressure to constantly provide even more capacity and computing power. Cloud computing offers huge opportunities to store, analyze and retrieve collected data - anytime, anywhere.