Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 4

The IoT is in position to become one of the greatest application performance management challenges faced by IT. APMdigest asked experts across the industry for their recommendations on how to ensure performance for IoT applications. Part 4, the final installment of the list, covering communication and the network.

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 1

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 2

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 3

19. THE NETWORK

The network makes the application possible, so having a reliable, robust and secure network is the best way to ensure performance of IoT applications. There are a variety of technologies that are being attempted for IoT networks but many will eventually fall short because they will be unable to evolve to deliver the performance that will ultimately be required. Cellular delivers fast speeds at a premium cost for bandwidth-intensive devices such as mobile phones, but cannot offer ubiquity of coverage and the optimization of power consumption – both critical attributes for IoT. Relying upon low-bandwidth high-latency tower-based technologies is dangerous, due to architectural capacity limitations. By using a mesh architecture, one can optimize for cost, coverage, scalability and reliability. A modern mesh architecture also offers increased reliability as use of the network increases because each new device broadens coverage and enables alternative pathways for communication. Finally, security is a key element of any high-performance application, and a layered, defense-in-depth approach, should be leveraged.
Don Reeves
CTO, Silver Spring Networks

20. PEAK TRAFFIC

IoT performance depends on both the availability and ability for the application infrastructure to support the number of devices and types of communications in the IoT solution. IoT is more dependent on harmonic communications where updates are sent at regular and fixed intervals. The application infrastructure must be able to deal with the peak communication patterns during these intervals in terms of volume of data and number of simultaneous connections. This is not unlike the localized surge in traffic experienced during major sporting events that occur on a regular basis (i.e. NFL matches).
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware

21. SEPARATE FROM BUSINESS NETWORK

A large IoT deployment can overwhelm and clutter a production network, simply in the number of devices and addresses used. Consider putting IoT devices on separate VLANs or separate wireless LANS and keep them firewalled off from your business network.
Jim Cashman
Senior Product Manager, Ipswitch

22. MULTI-SOURCE CLOUD MANAGEMENT

We tend to think of performance management as how people interact with applications, but IoT is about how things interact with things that interact with even more things, with a personalized human experience at the center of a tangled web. This new human experience creates a veritable ton of data in order to make our lives richer. For example, Oculus Story Studio is making virtual reality films you can interact with, Verily is working on a glucose-detecting contact lens for diabetes monitoring, and Moov one-ups fitness trackers by introducing real-time coaching to your workout. These devices create data that needs to be monitored and can introduces stress to the network. To handle this high-frequency data you need to introduce a distributed model for monitoring and embrace a multi-source cloud management strategy.
Shayne Higdon
President, Performance and Analytics, BMC Software

23. STANDARDIZATION

The lack of standardization for IoT protocols and security slows down communication for IoT devices, as messaging between the end devices and central infrastructure needs to be translated, encapsulated, encrypted, or all of the above multiple times along the path. Each time a message needs to be processed, this additional handling adds latency to the communication, degrading the IoT application performance.
Kimberley Parsons Trommler
Product Evangelist, Paessler AG

24. MACHINE-HUMAN COMMUNICATION

Many of us agree that IoT is one of the next big things which will have a significant impact on IT operations. Today, many focus on the sensor-device or sensor-monitor communications, protocols and security, but what happens when something wrong is detected or when the performance is deteriorating? In situations where human lives may be at risk or disasters imminent, I believe it is critical to think through the end-to-end use cases and pay special attention to the machine-human communication layer. Think about multi-modal notification, shift support, and escalation to ensure "someone" can take the appropriate action to fix the issue in a timely manner, should the issue be related to a pacemaker or a critical part of the engine of an airplane in air.
Vincent Geffray
Senior Director of Product Marketing, IT Alerting & IoT, Everbridge

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Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 4

The IoT is in position to become one of the greatest application performance management challenges faced by IT. APMdigest asked experts across the industry for their recommendations on how to ensure performance for IoT applications. Part 4, the final installment of the list, covering communication and the network.

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 1

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 2

Start with Top Recommendations to Ensure Performance for the IoT - Part 3

19. THE NETWORK

The network makes the application possible, so having a reliable, robust and secure network is the best way to ensure performance of IoT applications. There are a variety of technologies that are being attempted for IoT networks but many will eventually fall short because they will be unable to evolve to deliver the performance that will ultimately be required. Cellular delivers fast speeds at a premium cost for bandwidth-intensive devices such as mobile phones, but cannot offer ubiquity of coverage and the optimization of power consumption – both critical attributes for IoT. Relying upon low-bandwidth high-latency tower-based technologies is dangerous, due to architectural capacity limitations. By using a mesh architecture, one can optimize for cost, coverage, scalability and reliability. A modern mesh architecture also offers increased reliability as use of the network increases because each new device broadens coverage and enables alternative pathways for communication. Finally, security is a key element of any high-performance application, and a layered, defense-in-depth approach, should be leveraged.
Don Reeves
CTO, Silver Spring Networks

20. PEAK TRAFFIC

IoT performance depends on both the availability and ability for the application infrastructure to support the number of devices and types of communications in the IoT solution. IoT is more dependent on harmonic communications where updates are sent at regular and fixed intervals. The application infrastructure must be able to deal with the peak communication patterns during these intervals in terms of volume of data and number of simultaneous connections. This is not unlike the localized surge in traffic experienced during major sporting events that occur on a regular basis (i.e. NFL matches).
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware

21. SEPARATE FROM BUSINESS NETWORK

A large IoT deployment can overwhelm and clutter a production network, simply in the number of devices and addresses used. Consider putting IoT devices on separate VLANs or separate wireless LANS and keep them firewalled off from your business network.
Jim Cashman
Senior Product Manager, Ipswitch

22. MULTI-SOURCE CLOUD MANAGEMENT

We tend to think of performance management as how people interact with applications, but IoT is about how things interact with things that interact with even more things, with a personalized human experience at the center of a tangled web. This new human experience creates a veritable ton of data in order to make our lives richer. For example, Oculus Story Studio is making virtual reality films you can interact with, Verily is working on a glucose-detecting contact lens for diabetes monitoring, and Moov one-ups fitness trackers by introducing real-time coaching to your workout. These devices create data that needs to be monitored and can introduces stress to the network. To handle this high-frequency data you need to introduce a distributed model for monitoring and embrace a multi-source cloud management strategy.
Shayne Higdon
President, Performance and Analytics, BMC Software

23. STANDARDIZATION

The lack of standardization for IoT protocols and security slows down communication for IoT devices, as messaging between the end devices and central infrastructure needs to be translated, encapsulated, encrypted, or all of the above multiple times along the path. Each time a message needs to be processed, this additional handling adds latency to the communication, degrading the IoT application performance.
Kimberley Parsons Trommler
Product Evangelist, Paessler AG

24. MACHINE-HUMAN COMMUNICATION

Many of us agree that IoT is one of the next big things which will have a significant impact on IT operations. Today, many focus on the sensor-device or sensor-monitor communications, protocols and security, but what happens when something wrong is detected or when the performance is deteriorating? In situations where human lives may be at risk or disasters imminent, I believe it is critical to think through the end-to-end use cases and pay special attention to the machine-human communication layer. Think about multi-modal notification, shift support, and escalation to ensure "someone" can take the appropriate action to fix the issue in a timely manner, should the issue be related to a pacemaker or a critical part of the engine of an airplane in air.
Vincent Geffray
Senior Director of Product Marketing, IT Alerting & IoT, Everbridge

Related Links

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The Latest

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

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The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...