IoT & Automation

Although technology is quickly changing, your goals as a manufacturer likely haven’t. You still aim to please your customers by delivering quality products, while increasing productivity and profitability. Yet, new and unprecedented innovations will potentially impact all aspects of the execution of those goals at the operational level. Smarter connected devices that use open IoT protocols are rapidly penetrating factories. At the same time, the Industry 4.0 trend is showing how people, connected devices and artificial intelligence can work together to make factory automation more efficient and effective. To remain competitive, you must quickly adapt.

Before launching an IoT initiative, organizations need to have a comprehensive strategy in place. Otherwise, there’s a risk of overspending, exposing data to security and privacy threats, limiting the payback from IoT technologies, as well as other negative outcomes. Without three key elements — strong leadership, a sensible business plan, and a commitment to culture change — all the sensor, networking and data analytics technology in the world is not going to deliver optimum results. Your IoT initiative will likely face many challenges before you can proclaim it a success. Here are some important considerations to keep in mind.

If cybercrime were a country, it would have the 13th highest GDP in the world.  The global crime economy has become a self-perpetuating organism — an interlinked web of profit where the boundary between the legitimate and illegitimate is often unclear. Today, engaging in cybercrime is as simple as legitimate e-commerce. The dependency on the availability and performance of IT infrastructure among legitimate enterprises is increasing heavily, which makes them more vulnerable to breaches that can wreak havoc on business. Cybercriminals are clearly adept at leveraging existing platforms for commercial gain.

Industrial enterprises typically look to systems integrators to bridge the gaps with custom software development.  A few IoT vendors are now beginning to build more fully-integrated IoT service creation and enrichment platforms (SCEPs), designed to support an AFML IIoT architecture. SCEPs allow complex IoT architectures, applications and orchestrations to be efficiently created and evolved with minimal programming and administrative effort. These next-generation IoT platforms will help companies eliminate IoT data exhaust and harness IIoT data for use as a strategic business asset. 

Internet of Things is partly about value creation, using the ability to communicate and control things over connections and automating how we get work done. Products with embedded intelligence talking to the cloud bring the power of remote control to everyday things, much like the iPhone and iCloud has done. All this requires information technology (IT) to be embedded in our business systems that let us operate our businesses. In other words, it is operational technologies (OT) with IT inside. Ergo, IT + OT = IoT in a technological sense.

The Internet of Things remains one of the most revolutionary forces in today’s high-tech society. Along with its impressive growth rates and numerous deployments across different industries, IoT security remains the primary issue. 5 technological breakthroughs namely blockchain, PKI, IoT analytics, IoT authentication and IoT network security are making huge changes in terms of data privacy, seamless connectivity and manageability of IoT devices. This results in the emergence of innovative IoT security solutions which help global leaders embrace the digital trend without any risks.

The business landscape changes daily and with that comes new “buzzwords.” You know those ones that really bug you – those where you kind of know what they mean, but they can mean lots of things and different things to different people. One such word is “servitisation.” This term captures so many of the other current industry terms and buzzwords around Industry 4.0, digitisation, IoT, mobility and much more. What is needed is a focus on the data, the foundation of servitisation, and how to extract value from that data quickly through an “analytical life cycle.” 

The mobile app development domain is exciting and challenging at the same time. It is interesting to see how IoT impacts the mobile application development. The mobile domain always provides scope to access the IoT-enabled devices. Mobile apps are useful to access IoT ecosystems. Both IoT devices and mobile apps are two sides of a coin. They complement each other to create the third product, which is highly useful for the enterprises and enables entrepreneurs to stay ahead of the curve. Find a few ways in which IoT can affect the mobile app development.

IoT is rapidly emerging as the next giant technological leap towards global integration and interconnectivity. Combining the expansive geographic reach of Internet with the pervasiveness of everyday objects makes the Internet of Things a truly global network, where everything can communicate with everything else. The applications of this technology, or rather a phenomenon, though not fully realized, are already emerging everywhere around us.

Edge computing is a means of processing data physically close to where the data is being produced, i.e. where the things and humans are — in the field area, homes, and remote offices. Since they don’t live in the cloud, we need to complement cloud computing with many forms of computing at the edge to architect IoT solutions. Since we’re referring to computing close to the source of things, data, and action, a more generic term for this type of data processing is: proximity computing. In the next year, we will see reference architectures evolve to support new application patterns for IoT that incorporate proximity computing.

As enterprises delve more deeply into IoT, there will be a growing need for an operational intelligence-oriented data analyst as many IoT use-cases demand near real-time operational insight. So you can expect to see a huge uptick in demand for people who have technology and business skills related to the Internet of Things (IoT), as organizations continue to ramp up their IoT projects in a big way. As enterprises delve more deeply into IoT, there will be a growing need for an operational intelligence-oriented data analyst who is also an “AI/ML data engineer.”