Where Is IoT Headed? Gartner Highlights Top 10 Technologies
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Gartner has identified its top 10 IoT technologies, which it states “should be on every organisation’s radar through the next two years”.Gartner notes that IoT’s technologies and principles “will have a very broad impact on organisations, affecting business strategy, risk management and a wide range of technical areas such as architecture and network design”.

“The IoT demands an extensive range of new technologies and skills that many organisations have yet to master,” Nick Jones, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, commented

“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 organisations exploiting the IoT.

“In many technology areas, lack of skills will also pose significant challenges.”

Gartner’s top 10 IoT technologies for 2017 and 2018 are:

– IoT security

Gartner states that security technologies will be required to protect IoT devices and platforms from both information attacks and physical tampering, with security to be complicated by many “things” using simple processors and operating systems.

“Experienced IoT security specialists are scarce, and security solutions are currently fragmented and involve multiple vendors,” Jones observed.

“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 lifespan.”

– IoT analytics

IoT demands new analytic approaches, with new analytic tools and algorithms needed now, while as data volumes increase through 2021, IoT needs may diverge further from traditional analytics.

– IoT device (thing) management

Long-lived, non-trivial things will require both management and monitoring, including device monitoring, firmware and software updates, diagnostics, crash analysis and reporting, physical management and security management, with tools needing to be capable of managing and monitoring thousands and perhaps even millions of devices.

– Low-power, short-range IoT networks

Gartner states that low-power, short-range networks will dominate wireless IoT connectivity through to 2025, far outnumbering connections using wide-area IoT networks, while commercial and technical trade-offs mean 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 IoT applications, with the long-term goal of a wide-area IoT network to deliver data rates from hundreds of bits per second to tens of kilobits per second with nationwide coverage, a battery life of up to 10 years, an endpoint hardware cost of around US$5 and support for hundreds of thousands of devices connected to a base station or its equivalent.

While the first low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) were based on proprietary technologies, in the long term emerging standards such as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) will likely dominate.

– IoT processors

There are complex trade-offs between features, hardware cost, software cost and software upgradability, and understanding the implications of processor choices will demand deep technical skills.

– IoT operating systems

With operating systems such as Windows and iOS not designed for IoT applications, a wide range of IoT-specific operating systems have been developed to suit many different hardware footprints and feature needs.

– Event stream processing

Some IoT applications will generate extremely high data rates that will need to be analysed in real time, with distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) having emerged to address such requirements, typically using parallel architectures to process very high-rate data streams to perform tasks such as real-time analytics and pattern identification.

– IoT platforms

The services provided by IoT 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, visualisation, analytics and adapters to connect to enterprise systems.

– IoT standards and ecosystems

Standards and associated APIs will be essential as IoT devices will need to interoperate and communicate, with many IoT business models to rely on sharing data between multiple devices and organisations.

Many IoT ecosystems will emerge, with commercial and technical battles between these ecosystems to dominate areas such as the smart home, the smart city and healthcare, and organisations creating products may have to develop variants to support multiple standards or ecosystems, being prepared to update products during their lifespan as standards evolve and new standards and related APIs emerge.