Hannah Williams* says IoT has paved the way for smarter technologies and will only continue to proliferate in the year ahead.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has truly become a worldwide phenomenon.
IoT has paved the way for smarter technologies and will only continue to proliferate with the drive to connect absolutely everything.
Smart cities, connected cars and other emerging technology trends fuelled by IoT-enabled devices are likely to gain further pace — so here are some of the major IoT trends to expect in the year ahead.
Emergence of smart cities
The “smart city” is a broad term, but can be loosely defined as connectivity working behind the scenes in infrastructure and with urban planning to improve the lives of residents — for example, in sustainability, security, or optimising the flow of traffic.
“Until recently, smart cities were thought to be best underpinned by a centralised, cloud-based data processing and analytics engine that would collate data from different sources across the city,” said Tim Sherwood from Tata Communications.
“However, as more and more IoT-based smart city applications emerge, it’s clear now there is huge potential in harnessing edge analytics architecture.”
Edge computing is where the computing is performed close to the device at the “edge” of the network, which is particularly important for delivering applications where low latency is crucial — for example, with autonomous vehicles.
Rather than pinging back and forth between data centres that may be miles away, the critical compute is performed as close to the device as possible.
“Edge analytics enables smart cities to store, process and analyse data in real time at the device level,” Sherwood added.
“This approach offers benefits like reduced network burden and connectivity costs, reduced storage and database management costs and, most importantly, real-time data analysis at the IoT gateway with zero latency.”
IoT adoption
The adoption of IoT continues to grow globally.
New 5G networks will act as a core driver in the success of IoT.
The evolution of 5G will not only provide better experiences for existing applications, but also accelerate use cases that were not possible with previous generations of mobile networks, Telit CEO, Yosi Fait claims.
This will provide huge benefits for IoT devices as an integral part of industries such as healthcare and logistics.
Mikaël Schachne, CMO and VP of mobility and IoT business at BICS, notes that industrial IoT (IIoT) will give operators a new way to prioritise monetising 5G roaming.
Microsoft predicts that 94 per cent of businesses will be using IoT by the end of 2021.
“We’ll see the IIoT benefit from remote tracking, robotics, efficiencies in productivity and project management, and automation, while operators can unlock a major revenue opportunity and continue to monetise a core part of their service offering,” Schachne added.
Security concerns
One sticking point for IoT is in concerns around security.
The first major IoT-enabled attack was the emergence of the Mirai botnet in 2016, which combed open networks for insecure IoT devices.
This has led to improvements and better awareness around the dangers of IoT devices, but according to Karl Sigler, Threat Intelligence Manager at Trustwave SpiderLabs, IoT devices are “not getting any safer”.
“With the huge influx of IoT devices in homes and organisations, the attack surface targeted by criminals is just getting larger and more diverse,” Sigler said.
“Manufacturers and developers need to take the security reins.”
According to security vendor Trend Micro, AI and machine learning will be leveraged as ways to access connected devices in consumer and enterprise environments, predicting that malicious actors will make efforts to monetise IoT attacks, with digital extortion being the most likely outcome.
“IoT devices like routers will be monetised through botnets, which can be used subsequently as a distributed network for services offered to cybercriminals,” Trend Micro said in a report.
“It is not far-fetched to conjecture that router hacking will also come in the form of botnets used for Domain Name Server [DNS] hijacking, peddled as either crime-ware or a service, primarily for phishing.”
Automation and RPA
The rate of adoption for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) using bots to automate laborious tasks has spiked in recent years.
However, some experts are doubtful that RPA will truly be as transformative to the future of the workplace as vendors have positioned it.
“While RPA has been the hyped technology of 2019, its potential is ultimately limited and will never drive genuine business transformation,” Steve Haighway, COO Europe at IPsoft, said.
“With enterprises increasingly recognising its finite opportunity, next year we are likely to see a large uptake in hyper automation: a powerful blend of RPA, intelligent business management software and AI used to automate processes in a way that is significantly more impactful than standalone automation technologies.”
But others are more optimistic.
“Most companies will be able to automate at least 20 per cent of their workload within the space of five years,” James Ewing, a regional director at Digital Workforce told Computerworld.
“As some of the largest organisations in the financial and insurance sectors are moving to industrialise their automation efforts, smaller and niche players need to start their automation journey right away.”
“Without RPA, businesses will not only struggle to close the gap between them and their competitors but could even die out or be consumed by larger more efficient players.”
What to expect
According to Microsoft’s study, the future of IoT is dependent on other technology such as 5G and AI, which will be critical for success in the next two years.
“With innovation labs that were previously acting independently now more closely integrated with broader IT teams, and other stakeholders across the business engaged with the process, IoT projects will deliver concrete results for the enterprise,” Felix Gerdes, Director of Digital Innovation Services at Insight UK, said.
“Adoption will keep growing over the next three years as more organisations make use of scalable, easy-to-deploy, cloud-based IoT solutions such as Microsoft and BMW’s Open Manufacturing Platform.”
* Hannah Williams is an online editor at Computerworld and CIO in the UK.
This article first appeared at www.arnnet.com.au.
