When Cisco says an industry can potentially represent a more than $14-trillion opportunity to the global economy, everyone listens, and that is why the Internet of Things (IoT) has captured the attention of virtually every industry in the world. According to Cisco, we are on our way to having anywhere between 20 to 50 billion connected devices by 2020, and no matter which forecast you choose to accept, the potential is still very big. With as many as 50 billion connected devices in the world, the impact it will have on IT, CIOs, businesses, consumers, government and society in general will be significant.
Because the IoT will rely on networks and service providers, it should be the first thing that needs to be addressed. The sheer number of IP addresses for these devices means it will rely on IPv6, requiring expanded Domain Name Servers.
Once that has been established, wireless service providers will likely start evaluating their data charge plans because of the type of traffic generated by these devices. The transmission overhead they face will be high for IoT data, as much as 50 percent, even though the messages are only tens of bytes long. This will introduce a very critical question to the IoT; What is the monetary value of collecting all of that data from the IoT? The answer to this question will very likely determine the growth of the IoT.
According to Gartner research director Fabrizio Biscotti, "IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time. Processing large quantities of IoT data in real time will increase as a proportion of workloads of data centers, leaving providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges."
Personal data driven by consumers and big data by enterprises will impact the storage infrastructure as demand continues to increase. Additionally, the massive amount of traffic generated by machines will quickly surpass the bandwidth humans require. The billions of messages the machines send to data centers around the world will radically increase inbound data center bandwidth requirements. The challenges networks and data centers face for managing the traffic and data created by the IoT will be considerable, requiring capacity management that has yet to be established as many of the governance issues get worked out.
The impact on CIOs will be substantial whether they choose to admit it or not. A white paper released by Forrester analysts Christopher Mines and Michele Pelino stated "more than 50 percent of companies have no interest and/or no plans to implement machine-to-machine or Internet of Things capabilities, while just 8 percent tell us they have implemented M2M or IoT systems." Whether they have interests or not, the 20 to 50 billion connected devices will affect their organizations.
Mines and Pelino continue by saying, "Context-aware, location-based applications and services change how companies engage with and serve their customers. CIOs should straddle the line between what's possible from a technology perspective and what's meaningful to the business." The impact will be undeniable, and those CIOs that see the future and accept it for what it is will be the ones thriving.
Even though many might question the growth of the IoT, it will be impossible to do so once you take into account the growth of the global population and the dwindling of our natural resources. The only way we will be able to manage the world we live in is by making everything we use much smarter than it currently is. This includes energy, water, real estate, logistics, food, healthcare and more.
Some IoT applications include:
- Smart parking – monitoring availability of parking spaces in cities
- Traffic congestion – monitoring of vehicles and pedestrian to manage increasingly more congested roadways
- Waste management – to detect trash levels in bins for optimizing collection
- Forest fire detection – monitor combustibles and fire conditions
- Air pollution – control pollutants from farms, factories and vehicles
- Smart water - for monitoring water leakage, potable water and chemical leakage
- Logistics – for end-to-end shipment management
- Health care - patient surveillance in healthcare facilities and at home
The IoT will be responsible for hyper-innovation across different industries and it will affect not only the IT sector, but everything we use and consume, because that is the only way we will continue to thrive on this planet.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
