IoT Evolution

Your cloud initiatives are humming along, moving to the cloud. You are seeing a greater uptime, faster response times for your client's portals, easier to deploy security services and your advanced cloud initiatives such as adopting AWS RIs for steady-state usage and Azure Kubernetes for better container management. You feel good. You sleep better knowing that you finally have a handle on this cloud thing. And then you wake up, get on your Linkedin, and see an article about AI. And another on Edge Computing. More about IoT and 5G. And you say to yourself, "well, the cycle of tech innovation has marched on once again." and you drink your coffee (or tea) and get ready to dive back into learning. I would like to help and this series of articles is meant to help you explore the new wave of technology we are in.

Welcome to the Intelligent Era.

IoT is a term you are most likely familiar with but may not be aware of the changing nature of this term. The Internet of Things started out as an idea to describe the segment of the internet used by the many new smart devices we have. Alexas, Refrigerators, Smart Things, Wi-Fi enabled everything, and I even recently saw a "smart" dog bowl dish. These devices communicate across their own network, collecting data and then serving it to human beings who can decide how to use the information. However, as they evolved, these devices started not just reporting back to the user via a server but started to report to each other. Your Alexa can unlock your smart lock, feed your dog via the smart bowl, and turn on the lights in your house when you get close to home. Siri can guess where you are going based on the time and where you are moving and making suggestions for your smart devices to operate on. This type of interconnection requires not just devices but infrastructure on the back-end. And it now applies to your application.

McDonalds is looking to test a system that based on certain unique data about you can suggest what you should have. It can be based on biometrics of your mood based on facial recognition, the weather, and from your license plate what you recently purchased. These are all devices and sensors talking only to each other, creating data, consuming it, and changing their nature based on that data. A truly self-enclosed system where the machines are the content creators and consumers. This is the new definition of IoT. Entire self-contained systems from server to application that create their own data, based on their own observations, make a decision on how to act on that data and then serve it to achieve the desired result. And none of that required any human interaction. Truly an Internet for just the things.

How does this changing term for IoT apply to how you are doing business? IoT is a way to look at your infrastructure as the functionality and applications required to run your business as opposed to thinking of it in terms of servers and storage. With cloud computing, compute and storage can now scale on the fly, no longer requiring the long-term planning of what and how much to scale if it comes, you now just have to plan the how and once implemented, the infrastructure will scale for you. So the equation is now reduced to the applications you run and will eventually be reduced to the data itself as AI will have more capabilities of adjusting your infrastructure to meet the needs of your users, adjusting performance as well as the geographic location of the data to ensure a consistent experience no matter where your clients are. This is why it is critical to start thinking in IoT of your solution, as new technologies improve how you work with your data, eventually your data and the software that it runs on will be your only concerns.

Crossposted at: https://solutions.eateam.com/blog/the-concept-behind-iot/