On the consumer side, we have already seen intelligent things such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and a whole host of digital hostesses connecting us to the entire internet and the world at-large in entirely new ways. Our washers, dryers, and refrigerators – indeed our entire homes – along with our cars, computers, healthcare, and fitness devices can already be connected to remote control systems in the cloud and provide detailed operational reporting and self-diagnostics back.
On the enterprise front, very complex “things” (such as the newest jet engines) can have thousands of sensor points - the entire aircraft, tens of thousands – all dutifully recording, storing, and reporting data back to aggregation points so that later analysis can be performed, in addition to monitoring performance real-time to alert the crew to any possible malfunction. Commercial industry applications such as predictive maintenance driven by IoT data and predictive supply chain analytics will make up a whole new segment known as the Industrial Internet of Things.
Hence, we can expect thousands of new “thing-enabled” business models to emerge from both the consumer (Digital Economy) and commercial (B2B) Industrial Internet of Things space. By 2020, Gartner predicts that more than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the IoT.
While the Internet of Things has the potential to truly change our lives for the better, there are also many challenges that must be wrestled with as companies form their Digital Transformation strategies.
Sheer Data Volumes
According to ABI Research, the volume of data captured by the IoT by 2020 will exceed 1.6 zettabytes (for reference, one zettabyte is approximately one million terabytes). In 2014, the volume was just over 200 exabytes (7X less). Until now, only a small percentage of the data collected (>10%) was stored or made available for analytics due in part to the transport requirements of moving all that data across existing (read inadequate) network infrastructures. The other 90% is processed locally making analytics and cross-platform collaboration impossible.
With the widespread availability of 5G broadband, this is expected to change. Instead, a much higher percentage - if not all – of the data collected by the IoT will be brought back to cloud-based applications for analysis and post-analysis processing. Arguably, the ability to do advanced analytics is the primary reason for the very existence of most of the devices and sensors we call IoT. How will bringing so much data back impact the current network and cloud infrastructures? No one really knows.
“Just as we’re seeing a lot more complexity in the data, we’re seeing more complexity in how to manage that data. The challenge is going to be how to manage and store that data.” Gartner
IoT Cyber Security
The other elephant in the IoT room is of course cybersecurity. In October 2016, millions of hacked IoT devices infected with the Mira virus were used to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, an internet DNS service provider. The attack crippled Internet service across the US and affected more than 80 of the Internet’s largest websites.Investigators blamed the widespread infections on lax security measures, standard passwords that were never changed by consumers, and the lack of regulations and standards as to how cybersecurity will be implemented across the vast IoT landscape (for example, there are no requirements to provide ongoing security updates).
Since then, very little real progress has been made towards addressing the issues. To the contrary, experts have repeatedly warned about even more sophisticated malware and viruses being developed designed to exploit the pervasiveness of the many types of devices within the IoT. With potentially 50 billion devices and absolutely no surefire way to protect them all, it is surely just a matter of time before it happens again. Likely, it will be worse.
"This attack should be a wake-up call about security issues across IoT," said Mark Dufresne, director of threat research at Endgame, a cyber security company based in Arlington, Va.
