June 17, 2015 at 23:08New challenges for the IT industry
The Internet of Things (IoT), brought about by the advent of low-cost memory and an improved chipset, promises a future in which the Internet goes far beyond the familiar field of smartphones and computers.
Familiar devices and things never before connected to the Internet, houses, railways, buildings and bridges can now be controlled, communicated and responsive to environmental changes. More and more machines interact with each other, and companies get at their disposal huge amounts of new information.
The industry’s potential is huge: McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the Internet of Things can accelerate the global economy from $ 2.7 to $ 6.2 trillion annually until 2025.
The success of this new ecosystem will depend on a robust cloud infrastructure that manages all sensors, devices, and data. More and more companies are seeking to integrate their existing infrastructure for IoT devices by leveraging public and hybrid clouds to manage and scale their systems. Proper cloud offerings will enable companies to store and process IoT data collected for future reference.
However, the speed of implementation of IoT devices introduces a large number of new problems that will need to be addressed as the business accelerates its transition to cloud technologies.
Indeed, the size of the IoT sector itself creates external attacks of an unprecedented scale by the rapid proliferation (proliferation) of connected devices. Such changes, with the lack of standardized protocols and platforms, represent a new potential headache for the IT industry.
Everything controlled by a computer can be hacked or compromised by someone. In order to imagine such a development of events, one does not need to be a desperate pessimist or paranoid. Everything can go wrong and intentionally, and no. For this class of devices, vulnerabilities have already been found and widely covered in the press. Hacking smart TV, electronic droppers, pacemakers, electronic systems of cars and other equipment is news only for people who are not really interested in the topic. With a trillion devices involved, the network becomes particularly vulnerable, which raises well-deserved concerns.
Moreover, the vast majority of devices that are not phones, laptops or tablets do not receive automatic updates, and in many cases the end user cannot update the device’s firmware on their own.
Thus, the solution to the problems of the new sector lies entirely on the shoulders of the IT industry. These, of course, are growth diseases that promise to be part of yet another transitional stage in the history of disruptive technologies.
Familiar devices and things never before connected to the Internet, houses, railways, buildings and bridges can now be controlled, communicated and responsive to environmental changes. More and more machines interact with each other, and companies get at their disposal huge amounts of new information.
The industry’s potential is huge: McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the Internet of Things can accelerate the global economy from $ 2.7 to $ 6.2 trillion annually until 2025.
The success of this new ecosystem will depend on a robust cloud infrastructure that manages all sensors, devices, and data. More and more companies are seeking to integrate their existing infrastructure for IoT devices by leveraging public and hybrid clouds to manage and scale their systems. Proper cloud offerings will enable companies to store and process IoT data collected for future reference.
However, the speed of implementation of IoT devices introduces a large number of new problems that will need to be addressed as the business accelerates its transition to cloud technologies.
Indeed, the size of the IoT sector itself creates external attacks of an unprecedented scale by the rapid proliferation (proliferation) of connected devices. Such changes, with the lack of standardized protocols and platforms, represent a new potential headache for the IT industry.
Everything controlled by a computer can be hacked or compromised by someone. In order to imagine such a development of events, one does not need to be a desperate pessimist or paranoid. Everything can go wrong and intentionally, and no. For this class of devices, vulnerabilities have already been found and widely covered in the press. Hacking smart TV, electronic droppers, pacemakers, electronic systems of cars and other equipment is news only for people who are not really interested in the topic. With a trillion devices involved, the network becomes particularly vulnerable, which raises well-deserved concerns.
Moreover, the vast majority of devices that are not phones, laptops or tablets do not receive automatic updates, and in many cases the end user cannot update the device’s firmware on their own.
Let's try to highlight the most important IoT problems that need to be addressed as soon as possible:
Standardization of protocols and interfaces
This is generally an eternal problem in IT. Remember at least how many mines are broken on the battlefields for standardizing html and css. I’m silent about the dead battle of telecoms.Vulnerabilities and other security issues
It's one thing when a smartwatch goes crazy, and another when a portable pacemaker. In my opinion, the most real sector problem. How many schoolchildren will try to hack such devices just for fun is unknown. What security features will need to be used, too. And if you imagine a botnet of hundreds of millions of household and not so devices? Imagine how millions of teapots, refrigerators and fitness trackers are destroying a server at the command of a smart toaster? Of course, now this is still a long way off , but not in such a distant future.Network collapse
Today, networks still cope with data streams and telecoms are developing them intensively, but what if information flows increase hundreds of times? So far nothing steeper than FOCL has yet been invented, but this technology also has its limits. Okay, there are still highways, it seems like everything is still more or less, but the eternally dead “last mile”?Datacenters and computing power
The rapidly growing influx of data gives rise to a dual processing and storage problem that data processing and storage centers must solve. With this, everything is not so bad, after all, Google has been looking after our world for a long time, but it is not for nothing that the term "data tsunami" appeared .
Thus, the solution to the problems of the new sector lies entirely on the shoulders of the IT industry. These, of course, are growth diseases that promise to be part of yet another transitional stage in the history of disruptive technologies.