Gartner, Inc. has highlighted the top 10 Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that should be on
every organization's radar through the next two years.
"The IoT demands an extensive range of new technologies and
skills that many organizations have yet to master," said Nick Jones, vice president and distinguished analyst at
Gartner. "A recurring theme in the IoT space is the immaturity of
technologies and services and of the vendors providing them. Architecting for
this immaturity and managing the risk it creates will be a key challenge for
organizations exploiting the IoT. In many technology areas, lack of skills will
also pose significant challenges."
The technologies and principles of IoT will have a very broad
impact on organizations, affecting business strategy, risk management and a
wide range of technical areas such as architecture and network design. The top
10 IoT technologies for 2017 and 2018 are:
IoT Security
The IoT introduces a wide range of new security risks and
challenges to the IoT devices themselves, their platforms and operating
systems, their communications, and even the systems to which they're connected.
Security technologies will be required to protect IoT devices and platforms
from both information attacks and physical tampering, to encrypt their
communications, and to address new challenges such as impersonating
"things" or denial-of-sleep attacks that drain batteries. IoT security
will be complicated by the fact that many "things" use simple
processors and operating systems that may not support sophisticated security
approaches.
"Experienced IoT security specialists are scarce, and
security solutions are currently fragmented and involve multiple vendors,"
said Mr. Jones. "New threats will emerge through 2021 as hackers find new
ways to attack IoT devices and protocols, so long-lived "things" may
need updatable hardware and software to adapt during their life span."
IoT Analytics
IoT business models will exploit the information collected by
"things" in many ways — for example, to understand customer behavior,
to deliver services, to improve products, and to identify and intercept
business moments. However, IoT demands new analytic approaches. New analytic
tools and algorithms are needed now, but as data volumes increase through 2021,
the needs of the IoT may diverge further from traditional analytics.
IoT Device (Thing) Management
Long-lived nontrivial "things" will require management
and monitoring. This includes device monitoring, firmware and software updates,
diagnostics, crash analysis and reporting, physical management, and security
management. The IoT also brings new problems of scale to the management task.
Tools must be capable of managing and monitoring thousands and perhaps even
millions of devices.
Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks
Selecting a wireless network for an IoT device involves
balancing many conflicting requirements, such as range, battery life, bandwidth,
density, endpoint cost and operational cost. Low-power, short-range networks
will dominate wireless IoT connectivity through 2025, far outnumbering
connections using wide-area IoT networks. However, commercial and technical
trade-offs mean that many solutions will coexist, with no single dominant
winner and clusters emerging around certain technologies, applications and
vendor ecosystems.
Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks
Traditional cellular networks don't deliver a good combination
of technical features and operational cost for those IoT applications that need
wide-area coverage combined with relatively low bandwidth, good battery life,
low hardware and operating cost, and high connection density. The long-term
goal of a wide-area IoT network is to deliver data rates from hundreds of bits
per second (bps) to tens of kilobits per second (kbps) with nationwide
coverage, a battery life of up to 10 years, an endpoint hardware cost of around
$5, and support for hundreds of thousands of devices connected to a base
station or its equivalent. The first low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) were
based on proprietary technologies, but in the long term emerging standards such
as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) will likely dominate this
space.
IoT Processors
The processors and architectures used by IoT devices define many
of their capabilities, such as whether they are capable of strong security and
encryption, power consumption, whether they are sophisticated enough to support
an operating system, updatable firmware, and embedded device management agents.
As with all hardware design, there are complex trade-offs between features,
hardware cost, software cost, software upgradability and so on. As a result,
understanding the implications of processor choices will demand deep technical
skills.
IoT Operating Systems
Traditional operating systems (OSs) such as Windows and iOS were
not designed for IoT applications. They consume too much power, need fast
processors, and in some cases, lack features such as guaranteed real-time
response. They also have too large a memory footprint for small devices and may
not support the chips that IoT developers use. Consequently, a wide range of
IoT-specific operating systems has been developed to suit many different
hardware footprints and feature needs.
Event Stream Processing
Some IoT applications will generate extremely high data rates
that must be analyzed in real time. Systems creating tens of thousands of
events per second are common, and millions of events per second can occur in
some telecom and telemetry situations. To address such requirements,
distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) have emerged. They typically use
parallel architectures to process very high-rate data streams to perform tasks
such as real-time analytics and pattern identification.
IoT Platforms
IoT platforms bundle many of the infrastructure components of an
IoT system into a single product. The services provided by such platforms fall
into three main categories: (1) low-level device control and operations such as
communications, device monitoring and management, security, and firmware
updates; (2) IoT data acquisition, transformation and management; and (3) IoT
application development, including event-driven logic, application programming,
visualization, analytics and adapters to connect to enterprise systems.
IoT Standards and Ecosystems
Although ecosystems and standards aren't precisely technologies,
most eventually materialize as application programming interfaces (APIs).
Standards and their associated APIs will be essential because IoT devices will
need to interoperate and communicate, and many IoT business models will rely on
sharing data between multiple devices and organizations.
Many IoT ecosystems will emerge, and commercial and technical
battles between these ecosystems will dominate areas such as the smart home,
the smart city and healthcare. Organizations creating products may have to
develop variants to support multiple standards or ecosystems and be prepared to
update products during their life span as the standards evolve and new
standards and related APIs emerge.
