Internet of Things: The new challenges for the coming years

With the advent of the Internet of Things and the new business models that will go to trigger, companies will need to pay attention to a series of relevant technological issues, from security to ecosystems, via telecommunications.

The market analysis firm Gartner has highlighted the main scope Internet of Things technologies that each company should consider carefully and seriously over the next two years. Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at Gartner, says: ” IoT requires a wide range of new technologies and skills that many companies have yet to master.

A recurring theme in the IoT space is the immaturity of technologies and services that vendors provide them. Manage the risks of this immaturity will be a key challenge for the organizations that will exploit IoT. In many technologies areas also lack of skills, and expertise will be a major challenge. ”

The first category of technologies regards the IoT security, since the pervasive network of connected objects poses a new set of security risks both for the objects themselves, both for what in which objects are connected. Security technologies will be needed to protect devices and platforms from both the physical damage from the attack is to information.

It requires a new approach that not only steps from the encryption of communications, but it is able to deal with new elements such as the ability to ” impersonate ” objects or attacks ” denial of sleep ” able to exhaust the batteries of objects connected to a stable power source. Currently, the IoT security specialists are rare and the available solutions are fragmented.

You will then pay special attention to the technologies of IoT Analytics, since the Internet of Things will embrace new business models that take advantage of the massively variegated information collected from the objects so as to delineate and intercept, for example, the behavior of consumers to providing services, improving products, identify and intercept business opportunities.

But this is a need that requires new analytical tools and approaches with different algorithms from what is used today. Considering also the growth of the information volume, the need for the analytical IoT may diverge further from the current technologies and techniques.

Obviously the proliferation of connected devices, which will be mostly small, simple and often located in areas of difficult access (think, for example, to sensors placed in a water) distribution system will require a new set of monitoring instruments, update management, especially for those objects whose longevity has to be considered in the order of some luster. It will be necessary to adopt instruments and systems for monitoring and management capable of governing thousands, if not millions of devices.

It then opens the problem of telecommunications networks: in the field, IoT will be indispensable technologies that can create short-range networks and low power consumption as well as new solutions for the creation of broad-range networks since the normal cellular networks (at least until as there will be the dissemination of 5G technologies) do not offer ideal characteristics for the operation of devices and IoT applications.

Another important area of ​​attention concerns the processors and architectures at the base of an IoT device, which must of course be to define many of its capabilities, such as security features, energy consumption, ability to support an operating system, the possibility of update firmware, and so on.

Clearly there are important and complex compromised by having to perform and for this reason the understanding of the implications of choosing a processor will require in-depth skills and technical skills.

To this is added the fact that the currently popular operating systems are not suitable for IoT applications: too expensive from the point of view of resources and deficient of some features such as the guarantee of real-time responsiveness. The consequence is that a wide range of specific operating systems for IoT is in development so that they can adapt to the various needs of the future requests from the devices.

Data the most common scenarios of use of IoT devices, many of them will generate a stream of data that must be analyzed particularly significant in real time. The systems that create tens of thousands of events per second will be quite common, and with certain applications and certain scenarios of use, it may also assist in the creation of millions of events per second.

To meet this need are emerging platforms Distributed stream computing that make use of parallel architectures for processing large data streams and perform actions such as real-time analytics and identification of recurrences and patterns.

Finally, new standards and ecosystems, they will find no concrete definition in the API which in turn will be an essential element for interoperability and communication between devices and IoT systems, where many companies and various business models cannot help but rely on sharing of data between different devices and systems.

Obviously, we will witness the emergence of many IoT ecosystem with associated technological and commercial battles that will contend for smart-home spaces, smart-city and healthcare applications.

The realities that make products you will probably find in the position of having to develop variants that support various standard and ecosystems and be prepared upgrading of products throughout the life cycle, with existing standards evolve and new standards that overlook the scene.