A hybrid cloud-based distributed data management infrastructure for bridge monitoring

This paper describes a hybrid cloud-based distributed data management infrastructure platform for bridge monitoring applications. As the deployment of sensors and the collection of monitoring data continue to grow, proper management of the data becomes a paramount issue. Cloud computing is one viable approach that is popular among IoT and big data vendors. Cloud service provides many useful features, including reliability, flexibility and scalability and allows efficient and cost-effective use of resources. In practice, however, there is also a desire to maintain a local (private) server, for example, to handle sensitive data that bridge managers hesitate to upload on a public cloud. In this study, we design a hybrid framework in which the bridge monitoring data is distributed across public cloud platforms and private servers. Data distributed over the hybrid cloud environment can be accessed through unified web services with appropriate authority and access controls. The conceptual framework has been prototyped and demonstrated using Microsoft Azure cloud service and a private server.