Most IIoT deployments involve connected devices at the scale of thousands if not millions. Management of these devices at scale is one of the core offerings of most IoT cloud providers. The end-to-end life cycle management of devices includes secured provisioning, identity and access control, configuration management, remote monitoring of device health, and retirement of unused devices. An automated device provisioning service registers new devices with geographically diverse PoPs, manages device configurations, secures devices by pushing OTA patches and updates, and also re-provisions devices when they reconnect or relocate.
For secured and efficient access to device state information and health data, and to facilitate analysis and business application development, a virtual replica of each device is maintained in the cloud. This replica is referred to by various names by various cloud platforms, for example, "digital or device twins", "device shadows", and so on...
