The Internet of Things abbreviated as 'IoT' is a word that you should familiarize yourself with because you're going to be hearing that word for years to come. Unless, of course, you're up to here with hearing about the Internet of Things.
The definition Oxford Dictionary gives us is: "The interconnection via the internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data."
Making the world's appliances, cars, televisions, radios, houses, malls and anything you could almost think of, a smart object.
The attractiveness of making our everyday objects connect to the internet is that we would be able to control them from a smartphone and access data on how those things are performing and how efficiently they are operating. Everything sent to a cloud, so you would be able to review any data for the rest of your life and it will never go missing.
Could the Internet of Things revolution lead to a cautionary tale about cyber security relatively soon? Perhaps. Cyber security studies will see a major spike in attendance and does need to be stepped up so that hackers cannot compromise the devices that are connected to the internet.
In India, The Financial Express spoke to Ashish Gulati, a manager at Telit India who focus on connecting businesses through the Internet of Things. He said: "Recent research conducted by Forrester in the retails industry found that 96% of retail decision makers are hoping to make the necessary changes to adopt IoT solutions in the near future, but over half are concerned about integration challenges."
Engineering and electronics giant, Bosch, is releasing their own software that will allow the exchange of data on their machines across the IoT networks. CEO Volkmar Denner said: "Many companies and consumers state that security concerns keep them from using cloud technologies and connectivity solutions." However, it seems that Bosch is confident in the IoT solutions they have and says that the progress in this sector - for them - is a milestone for the company.
Even Coca-Cola is getting involved. Derek Myers, a group director of strategy and commercialization said to reporters that the vending machines in the United States are now capturing 100 plus data points a second. The analytics that machines will be able to compute is going to be useful for any company that has a device connected to their IoT network. They will use IoT to display messages to a customer via the screen and could have the vending machines talking to each other as well.
What remains true about the IoT is the complexity of the network that these devices will be connected to. Research corporation, Gartner, estimated that 21 billion devices will be connected to the IoT by the year 2020. According to Crain's Detroit Business there are already 5 billion devices connected.
The possibilities of IoT are endless and more players will be throwing their hats into the ring and will go head to head to be the main provider of IoT hardware and software in the years to come. It is going to be interesting but the necessary cyber security needs to be in place if we are to have 21 billion devices connected by 2020.
