An Integrated System for Advanced Multi-risk Management Based on Cloud for IoT

This chapter presents the Cloud computing technology as strategic solution for the deployment of IoT application and solutions. Cloud computing is a new ICT paradigm able to offer products and solutions as services. Thus, it allows the delivery of on-demand virtual resources (e.g., computational resources, storage systems, applications, data centers,...) over the Internet on a pay-for-use basis. Also, the distributed nature of Cloud computing guarantees high availability of resources dynamically adapting their allocation to specific requirements of the system. The research community together with big business companies are focusing their efforts in the adoption of Cloud for a massive interaction with the physical environment. To show a such trend, we present an on-going project, called SIGMA, which exploits Cloud technologies to acquire, integrate and compute heterogeneous data from several sensor networks for controlling and monitoring both environmental and industrial production systems. Specifically, we describe a new Cloud framework at the basis of the whole SIGMA architecture, in order to show benefits in the adoption of a such technology. The framework is compliant with the Sensor Web Enablement standard specifications and makes use of a plug-in platform to integrate heterogeneous sensing infrastructures. It allows to build abstract objects for accessing sensing devices and observations pandering to the Internet of Things needs.