Jun 23, 2023swXtch.io, a wholly owned subsidiary of IEX Group, has announced the launch of its Internet of Things (IoT) commercial offering for cloudSwXtch. The new product, according to the company, is designed to help businesses accelerate their digital transformations and migrate high-performance workloads to the cloud. cloudSwXtch allows users to equip cloud-networking stacks with features required for on-premises workflows. Features now accessible include multicast, high availability and Precision Time Protocol.
Workflows that could benefit from the solution, the company notes, include cloud-based audio and video monitoring, as well as virtual test and simulation. "Cloud computing has been a cornerstone of IoT industry growth," said Brent Yates, swXtch.io's CEO, in a prepared statement, "driving new heights in asset and operational performance and opening the door to new business models. With cloudSwXtch, no-code multicast enablement is available to network engineers for the first time on all the major clouds."
Local and state governments often rely on large, rugged camera networks to monitor thousands of real-time streams for traffic, emergency management and other services. These networks overwhelmingly originate and distribute multicast streams, swXtch.io explains, which were previously incompatible with existing cloud networks. The cloudSwXtch system is available via the Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services marketplaces, and is certified for deployment in Google Cloud as well. The company says it plans to add support for additional cloud platforms later this year, including for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The cloudSwXtch solution offers two primary features to support the migration of video-monitoring workflows from on-premises to cloud: the ability to enable multicast traffic distribution from on-premises to edge and cloud environments, and to enable bandwidth conservation using the dynamic bridge feature. This allows users of cloud-based video-monitoring solutions to cycle between all video streams available in the on-premises environment, the company explains, and to select specific streams to distribute the cloud on demand. For example, instead of sending all streams to the cloud, an emergency manager could select a particular traffic camera's video feed to pull up for viewing.
Across various industries, swXtch.io reports, companies rely on purpose-built, on-premises test and simulation platforms to virtually commission assets and controls, train operators under real-world scenarios, and drive process performance or product design improvements. A common theme is that each test and simulation environment is built to recreate physical parameters in a virtual environment and subject them various scenarios and conditions. This has driven much of the market to a virtual machine or cloud-based approach for more attractive scale, speed and consistency, the company notes.
Many test and simulation platforms work in the cloud, but those utilizing on-premises platforms designed for multicast and broadcast protocol traffic face migration hurdles. By allowing such capabilities in the cloud, cloudSwXtch enables access to cloud-based virtual simulation environments. "CloudSwXtch has been a revelation for companies looking to migrate to the cloud and take advantage of the benefits it offers," Yates said in the statement. "Many of our customers do not realize they have an issue until their attempted migration to the cloud is well underway. We are proud to provide a solution that simply and efficiently meets our clients' needs and advances the potential of IoT applications around the world."
