At this point, we believe we have a business case, but haven't gathered enough details regarding the costs of design, deployment, and management of the solution, to know for sure. As we formulate the other aspects of the architecture in subsequent chapters, we will be able to better assess the scope of the effort and then can begin to gather more accurate cost information. We can plug those costs into the model we will describe here.
Benefits are also speculative at this point and will be until the project moves into production. However, if line of business leaders think that the numbers are realistic, that is good enough for now. We should gather a current business baseline so that we will be able to compare it to the benefits we achieve through our project implementation later.

The costs and benefits will continue to accrue as we deploy various stages of the project. We'll provide an illustration of this later, in the section of the chapter showing our supply chain project rollout timeline.

Costs we need to consider can be categorized as solution development and implementation (usually the greatest cost item), underlying infrastructure, and ongoing operations, management, and support. These costs can be associated with each of these major component locations in the IIoT technology footprint:

• Backend infrastructure (data center if on-premises or in the public cloud)
• Networking from the edge devices to the data center
• Edge devices (smart devices containing sensors)

We'll begin exploring costs by first looking at the backend infrastructure cost models.