Podcast – The Internet of Things
In our latest csuite podcast, we discuss the Internet of Things (IoT), with a number of experts who contributed to the new Tyto Hype Report on the subject
Produced in partnership with Tyto, the latest csuite podcast discusses their Hype Report on IoT, hearing from a number of experts who contributed to it including:
Brendon explained IoT is one of the top five technology discussions that’s been going on over the past five years. It’s at the top of the Gartner Hype Cycle, with around a quarter of a million articles in 2017 focused on IoT.
Data Collection
Stephanie wrote “connected devices and assets alone are not what is revolutionary but what we can do with the information data and analysis of things that are connected is where we expect progress”
According to IHS Markit, there will be more than 31bn IoT connected devices in 2018 and Intel said that just one autonomous car will create 4000GB of data a day.
Stephanie said that we have to look through each and every component. How often are we collecting the data, monthly, weekly, hourly or ongoing? We also have to think about the priority, is this something that could take down our network, our supply chain or our business operations? Will this affect our customers? And as we start to look through the data, some data might need to be combined with other pieces of information to really bring that level of intelligence to the business and really make it actionable.
Security
James Smythe, Editor, Mighty Gadget, wrote “We have already seen millions of baby cams use for botnets. AI assistants are designed to listen constantly. So, for one of these systems to be compromised would be catastrophic as it is so easy to set up.”.
Andrew said that in the last couple of years we’ve seen all sorts of things hacked including the NHS going off line and political campaigns destabilised.
Abraham added that part of the challenge of security is in many cases it is a bit of an after-thought, so people are building devices and rolling them out with default passwords, and in some cases, people are not even aware that they have installed these ‘back doors’ into their operations. He said that standards are somewhat lagging. However, in the UK, there is now the IoT Security Foundation.
Dan thinks that the industry is classic Gartner Hype Curve –we’re wanting to discover real use cases and ways to apply it. Within the report, he said “ROI is elusive and not measurable as a direct payback in some cases”.
Dan also talked about the divide between OT and IT teams in the report. He said there is a gap and he thinks there has to be a dialogue and a respect for the OT to make the IT win.
Andrew explained that there are a number of companies in the UK that have telematics that enable cars to talk to insurance companies and this is a change to the business model. Other real time insurance examples include leaving the house and insuring your laptop or your bike just for that period of time and when you’re home again it’s not insured. However, Abraham was concerned about this as there is a societal impact. He said that some people benefit more than others and that there are some dangers. First of all, the privacy, but also that it’s not just about you and your car and your journey but also the environment.
Blockchain
Andrew explained that Blockchain is a distributed ledger – an irrefutable version of the truth. Each time a transaction is registered it’s recorded onto a block that gets longer and longer and longer. If you add IoT and you want to have proof that this data actually happened and it’s irrefutable, where in an event, something went wrong, the moments before it went wrong you would want to have an irrefutable version of the truth.
Digital Twins
Rich talked about the need to create digital twins that can model the physical assets and help operators make intelligent decisions around managing those assets. Rich said that IoT is therefore about getting everything connected, but that is just half the battle. You also need to start to model that physical machine within the computer, which is the whole concept of the digital twin, where this raw cryptic machine data is streaming in to a platform and the digital twin is able to take that raw cryptic machine data and start to translate it into human readable information, where it can now be blended with data that’s in your Oracle databases or your SAP systems or even your unstructured data like e-mail or PDFs or work orders.
The next 12-18 months
Rich thinks that the biggest challenge for IoT as it is evolving from very customized and specialized solutions to more turnkey or productised offerings, that can be very easily deployed and consumed in some enterprises and so, going forward, he feels we almost need the equivalent of fitbits for machines.
Stephanie expects to see consolidation in the market as she believes there are too many so-called platform companies.
Abraham expects the connectivity battle to continue but he sees a lot more happening in the Drone space.
Andrew didn’t think the sim will exist in a few years’ time in any device.
Brendon said that in the tech world, momentum is everything, but it can be very easily lost if people don’t see substance to back up the hype.
Subscribe to the series on Soundcloud, iTunes, TuneIn, acast, Google Podcasts and Stitcher.
Join the community on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.