ITH Consulting — Independent IoT & Cloud Architecture

What you get

Outcomes, Not Slide Decks

Clear architecture decisions with documented trade-offs — not open-ended recommendations.

Reduced technical and operational risk before you commit to vendors or platforms.

Correct connectivity and protocol choices based on your constraints — not a vendor's roadmap.

Production-ready security, fleet operations, and monitoring from day one.

Vendor-neutral guidance so you retain control and avoid lock-in.

Services

Productized Engagements

Defined scope, clear deliverables, fixed structure. No hourly treadmill.

Enterprise

Architecture Review

For teams with an existing IoT system or a detailed design — who need an independent second opinion.

Protocol selection assessment (MQTT vs CoAP)
Security model review including OSCORE
Fleet operations readiness (OTA, monitoring, alerting)
Written report with prioritized recommendations

SME & Enterprise

IoT & Connectivity Strategy

For organizations evaluating connectivity options before committing to hardware or network investments.

LoRaWAN (public, private, and AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN)
BLE at scale — provisioning, gateways, mobile flows
NB-IoT in real-world environments
Trade-offs, constraints, and long-term cost analysis

SME & Enterprise

Cloud & Security Architecture

For teams designing or migrating IoT backends — who need a secure, scalable foundation.

AWS IoT Core architecture and AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN
Device identity and provisioning model
Multi-tenant and multi-region considerations
Security architecture documentation

Enterprise

Operations & Observability Concept

For teams operating fleets in production — who need structured monitoring, alerting, and incident workflows.

Monitoring strategy and fleet health KPIs
Alerting with hysteresis and severity models
Notification channel design (push, email, SMS, voice, WhatsApp)
Incident readiness and escalation playbooks

SME

Pilot / PoC Advisory

For teams moving from idea to first deployment — who want to avoid expensive detours.

Success criteria and scope definition
Technology and vendor shortlist
Production-readiness checklist
Rollout and operations planning

Enterprise

Vendor & Platform Evaluation

For procurement and engineering teams evaluating IoT platforms — who need structured, vendor-neutral comparison.

Requirements mapping and weighting
Platform scoring and gap analysis
RfP support and vendor Q&A
Decision documentation for stakeholders

Technical Depth

Under the Hood

Written for engineers and technical leaders. This is what we actually work on.

Connectivity & Protocols

LoRaWAN

Public network deployments using shared infrastructure, and private LoRaWAN networks for campus, industrial, and rural environments where coverage or data sovereignty matters. Deep experience with AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN — device onboarding, gateway qualification, and integration with the broader AWS IoT ecosystem. Gateway planning, network server selection, and ADR tuning for real-world conditions.

Bluetooth Low Energy

BLE at scale means dealing with provisioning flows, gateway density, mobile app handoffs, and firmware update distribution. Not just pairing two devices — managing thousands with consistent behavior across hardware revisions.

NB-IoT

Narrowband IoT in real-world deployments: coverage gaps in basements, carrier selection trade-offs, PSM and eDRX configuration for battery life, and fallback strategies when network conditions are inconsistent.

MQTT vs CoAP

MQTT for persistent connections and pub/sub patterns. CoAP for constrained devices with limited resources and UDP-based transport. The choice depends on power budget, payload size, network reliability, and whether you need request/response semantics or event streams.

Fleet Operations & Security

Device Identity & Provisioning

Unique identity per device from manufacturing through decommissioning. Certificate-based authentication, just-in-time provisioning via AWS IoT Core, and credential rotation without manual intervention. Multi-tenant isolation where required.

Secure CoAP with OSCORE

Where TLS/DTLS is not feasible — constrained memory, NAT traversal issues, or proxy-based architectures — OSCORE provides end-to-end security at the application layer over CoAP, independent of the transport.

OTA Update Strategies

Canary rollouts to a small device group first. Staged rollout campaigns with health checks between stages. Automatic rollback on failure thresholds. Delta updates to minimize bandwidth. Full audit trail of what firmware runs where.

Mass Configuration

Campaign-based configuration changes across thousands of devices with version tracking, dry-run validation, and rollback capability. Every change auditable — who pushed what, when, to which group.

Monitoring & Alerting

Production-grade observability for IoT fleets. Not dashboards — operational confidence.

Metric-Based Alerting with Hysteresis

Threshold-based alerts that require a value to exceed the trigger point and stay there before firing, and drop below a separate recovery threshold before clearing. This eliminates alert flapping when values oscillate near boundaries — one of the most common sources of noise in IoT monitoring.

Severity Models

Three-tier severity (info, warning, critical) with distinct behavior per level. Info events get logged. Warnings trigger notifications during business hours. Critical alerts escalate immediately and page on-call staff. Severity determines both the notification channel and the response expectation.

Device-Level vs Fleet-Level Alerts

A single sensor reporting high temperature is a device alert. Twenty percent of sensors in a zone reporting high temperature is a fleet alert — and requires a different response. Alert deduplication prevents hundreds of individual notifications from drowning out the systemic signal.

Escalation & Notification Channels

Time-based escalation when alerts are not acknowledged: push notification first, then email, then SMS, then voice call. Severity-based channel selection — critical issues skip email and go straight to phone. WhatsApp integration for teams that operate in the field. Every notification trackable.

Who We Work With

Two Entry Points — Same Engineering Mindset

SMEs & Mid-Market

You have an IoT idea, a sensor concept, or a pilot that needs to become a product. The risk is spending six months and significant budget on the wrong connectivity, the wrong platform, or an architecture that cannot scale past the PoC.

Clarity before you commit to vendors or hardware
A realistic path from idea to pilot to production
Connectivity and protocol decisions that hold up at scale
Avoiding costly re-architecture after the first 500 devices

Talk About Your Pilot

Enterprise & Corporates

You have an existing IoT system, an architecture under review, or a procurement decision ahead. You need an independent perspective — someone who does not sell hardware, does not resell cloud platforms, and has no vendor incentives.

Independent architecture reviews with written deliverables
Governance, security, and scalability assessment
Procurement and RfP support with structured vendor evaluation
Fleet operations readiness for large-scale rollouts

Request an Architecture Review

Selected Work

Project Snapshots

Anonymized due to NDA. Representative of the type and scale of engagements.

Industrial

Sensor Monitoring

Problem: Growing sensor fleet (~10,000 devices) with inconsistent connectivity, no structured monitoring, and manual firmware updates slowing down rollouts.
Approach: Connectivity audit across LoRaWAN and NB-IoT. Defined fleet operations model with staged OTA updates, campaign-based configuration, and structured alerting.
Outcome: Unified connectivity strategy. Firmware update cycle reduced from weeks to days. Alert noise reduced by over 80% through hysteresis and deduplication.

Automotive / Fleet

Connected Vehicle Platform

Problem: Vehicle fleet approaching ~500,000 connected units. Existing architecture showed scaling limits in device provisioning, telemetry ingestion, and operational visibility.
Approach: Architecture review covering cloud ingestion layer, device identity model, and monitoring stack. Defined severity-based alerting with escalation workflows and fleet-level health KPIs.
Outcome: Provisioning redesign supporting zero-touch onboarding. Monitoring rearchitected with fleet-level anomaly detection and severity-driven notification channels including voice escalation.

Operations

Monitoring & Alerting Overhaul

Problem: Operations team overwhelmed by alert volume. Hundreds of notifications per day with no prioritization, no deduplication, and no escalation path.
Approach: Implemented three-tier severity model with hysteresis-based thresholds. Added alert deduplication, fleet-level aggregation, and time-based escalation across push, email, SMS, and voice.
Outcome: Actionable alerts reduced to under 20 per day. Mean time to acknowledge critical issues dropped significantly. On-call burden reduced measurably.

SME

LoRaWAN Pilot — Environmental Sensing

Problem: SME planning first IoT deployment for environmental monitoring across distributed sites. No in-house IoT expertise. Unclear which connectivity and cloud approach to take.
Approach: Defined pilot scope and success criteria. Evaluated public LoRaWAN vs private deployment. Selected cloud platform based on operational requirements, not feature lists.
Outcome: Pilot deployed on schedule with clear production-readiness criteria. Client avoided premature private network investment, saving significant upfront cost.

Enterprise

Cloud & Security Architecture

Problem: Enterprise migrating from on-premise IoT backend to AWS. Existing system lacked proper device identity, had no multi-tenant isolation, and used shared credentials across device groups.
Approach: Designed AWS IoT architecture with per-device certificates, just-in-time provisioning, and tenant-isolated data paths. Documented security model including OSCORE for constrained field devices.
Outcome: Migration executed without production downtime. Security posture moved from shared credentials to individual device identity with automated rotation.

Enterprise

Vendor Evaluation & RfP

Problem: Corporate evaluating three IoT platforms for a multi-year commitment. Internal team lacked structured comparison methodology and vendor-neutral perspective.
Approach: Built weighted evaluation framework covering fleet operations, security, extensibility, and total cost of ownership. Ran structured vendor Q&A and proof-of-concept scenarios.
Outcome: Board-ready decision document with clear scoring and gap analysis. Selected platform aligned with long-term operational requirements, not initial feature impressions.

Details available on request due to NDA.

About

ITH Consulting GmbH

Dipl.-Ing. Marcus Harringer

CEO & Principal Consultant

ITH Consulting GmbH

ITH Consulting is an independent IoT and cloud architecture advisory. Our work focuses on helping organizations make sound technical decisions about connectivity, fleet operations, security, and scalability — before committing to platforms, vendors, or long-term contracts.

Our approach is architecture-first: understand the constraints, evaluate the options, document the trade-offs, and deliver a clear recommendation. We do not resell hardware, we do not have cloud platform partnerships, and we have no vendor incentives. The advice is the product.

Over the past two decades we have worked across industrial IoT, automotive telematics, and connected product platforms. Our experience spans systems from a few hundred sensors to fleets of hundreds of thousands of connected vehicles — across LoRaWAN, BLE, NB-IoT, MQTT, CoAP, AWS IoT, and ThingsBoard.

We operate from Salzburg, Austria, and work with clients across Europe, the United States, and the Middle East — remotely and on-site as needed.

Contact

Let's Talk

Get in Touch

Email

office@ith-consult.com

Address

ITH Consulting GmbH
Fachmarktstrasse 3A
5071 Wals-Siezenheim
Austria

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