The Aptilo IoT Connectivity Control Service™ (IoT CCS) delivers the scalability and flexibility necessary for operators to rapidly innovate in the IoT era. It allows mobile operators to offer instant IoT service creation, with a service that lets business customers define their own granular connectivity and security policies – at a fraction of the cost.
Explore more about the IoT Connectivity challenges for mobile operators and how Aptilo CCS can help. Register now for our Live webinar on Wednesday February 5, 2020. A recording of the webinar will be available on-demand.
Some members of the Aptilo team gives their view on IoT and the Aptilo IoT CCS service.
Mobile operators have designed their mobile core for a handful of different subscription types, resulting in a few pre-defined policies.
However, IoT customers often need their own unique subscriptions. Subscriptions with complex, dynamic connectivity and security policies. Furthermore, IoT business customers want to sit in the driver’s seat and manage their own policies.
The ability to offer these kinds of instant, customized IoT connectivity services is therefor very challenging. Sometimes it is nearly impossible to achieve these kinds of services in the current mobile core. That was what one of our longstanding mobile operator customers told us.
That was the start of the Aptilo IoT Connectivity Control Service™, one of Aptilo’s IoT solutions.
To keep up with IoT customer’s demands, we have seen mobile operators building a dedicated mobile core just for IoT. But is this really necessary? Is it even enough?
Our first IoT CCS customer, a tier 1 mobile operator, stated that they couldn’t get the IoT connectivity management they needed even in a dedicated IoT mobile core. And just think about the additional cost of duplicating mobile core nodes and to scale for capacity in two places.
Mobile operators can also deliver a simple “bit-pipe” like service from their existing mobile core. But where is the money in this? Where is the customer stickiness?
With Aptilo IoT CCS, mobile operators can add an IoT connectivity control and security layer for their IoT services on top of the existing mobile core. Best of all, it will work with the coming service-based 5G core (5GC) architecture. Aptilo IoT CCS™ is based on Aptilo’s IoT Connectivity Management Platform – Aptilo SMPIoT. It is delivered as a service from Amazon Web Services (AWS), so it is all an operational expenditure (OPEX).
The Aptilo Connectivity Control Service enables new and innovative IoT services. It produces new IoT services that you have never seen before. In a matter of days rather than months and hence also to a fraction of the alternative cost.
Aptilo has been working with policy control solutions since 2001. Every day we provide connectivity for 200+million people and even more things. We have done so long before things was called M2M and not IoT.
We work in the signalling/control plane and needed a partner in the traffic/data plane to realize the Aptilo IoT Connectivity Service Service. The choice fell on Fortinet and their FortiGate next-generation firewalls. Fortinet is among the top #3 cybersecurity companies in the world and over 425,000 customers trust them to protect their businesses.
Through Fortinet we get policy enforcement at the edge, device traffic filtering, protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), limitation of the number of TCP connections and more. The detection of anomalies are also part of the Aptilo IoT CCS security with the symbiotic partnership between Aptilo and Fortinet.
Operators can add international mobile operator partners to their Aptilo IoT CCS service. Combined with their ability to instantly localize eSIM cards (eUICC) over-the-air, operators can offer a truly global connectivity without roaming charges.
Through the Aptilo CCS multitenancy virtual APN, operators can offer a secure international connectivity with optional local break-out for selected traffic. The business customer can save significantly in logistics and administration costs by handling just one unified eSIM card and one VPN connection instead of multiple local SIM cards and VPN connections for each mobile operator. All IoT units in their warehouse can have identical configuration with localization over-the-air (OTA) when the end-user switch them on for the first time in the destination country. For the IoT customer this means a streamlined logistics and reduced tied-up capital. For the mobile operator it means a customer stickiness that few services can offer and the possibility to charge a value-based premium price for the IoT connectivity service.
