Cloud services bind distributed edge devices together, and provide analytics, intelligence, data storage, and event-processing capabilities for IoT systems. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) offer menus of IoT-tailored services that make it easier to connect, manage, monitor, and control large numbers of devices.

With these services, system designers can implement new cloud-based capabilities such as asset and inventory management, service provisioning, billing and entitlements management, sensor coordination, customer intelligence and marketing, information sharing, and messaging.

These services expose interfaces for IoT products, and these interfaces and the services that support IoT at the edge must remain secure. 

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• The role of the cloud in IoT systems
• Threats to IoT cloud services 
• The concept of the fog
• Cloud-based security services for IoT systems