**4.3 Cloud platforms**

Monitoring for smart irrigation results in enormous amounts of data that needs to be stored for processing. Data is generated by weather, soil, and plant sensors in real-time at every time step. This data is transferred to a cloud-based platform for storage and processing. Some of the common cloud platforms used in smart irrigation studies include Thinkspeak (**Figure 7**), (MATLAB), FIWARE, Dynamo, and MongoDB, among others [49]. Thinkspeak is a cloud-based data platform for storage, visualization, and retrieving of sensor data. A microcontroller can be connected to this platform for processing.
