What is IoT really?

When a Tesla owner summons their shiny computer that runs on wheels; when a morning jogger checks stats after workout on Fitbit, when Alexa reads you news for the day and when a security camera sends you updates upon detecting motion - what do you see? I see everyday things - a car, a heartbeat monitor, a speaker and a camera – connected to the internet and seamlessly bridging the gap between physical and digital worlds. In a more technical term - the Internet of Things. 

Internet of Things or IoT is a collection of devices that can connect to the internet and share information. At over 60 billon, consumer IoT spending is a booming market but the real scale is seen in industries. Manufacturing industry is one of the biggest consumers of IoT – a single plant can deploy thousands of sensors on their equipment to monitor the health of machinery, reduce operational risks and increase efficiency by understanding usage. Energy and oil companies are another big adopter of IoT. On an average, about 130 devices connect to the internet every second. 

The end products used by a plant operator or a consumer are simple and easy to use but creating an IoT solution is not necessarily the easiest process. As a software engineer working in IoT, I see some major challenges –  

• scale of devices and sensors : while setting up a few smart lights in a home might be easy, its not the same as smart lighting for a big university campus. Or, motion sensors on engines of an airline fleet.
• management of these devices: If you've had to deploy a service update to multiple customers, you'll understand what this means. Adding and deleting sensors, deploying a security patch, sending commands to reboot - all of this and more at a scale of thousands of devices.
• Security of data being sent back and forth: While most of the communication is through secure protocols, there is always a possibility of a breach. If somebody intercepts the wifi at my house and controls the thermostat to toast the living room - i'm not gonna like it. Manipulating humidity sensor in assembly line of a silicon engine part is a slightly more critical scenario.
• Analyzing the massive amounts of data: Millions of messages flow between the network and connected devices everyday. For a critical system, a sensor could be sending up status of its health every second. Multiply this with the total number of devices. Huge amount of data and is generated and can be a powerful tool to understand the working of the physical system.

Microsoft IoT Central and IoT Hub, HPE IoT solutions, AWS IoT 1-click are a few among many others providing solutions to the some of the above problems. 

As a consumer(in pursuit of a perfectly smart home) and developer of IoT(my day job involves creating enterprise IoT solutions for digital transformation), I’m excited by the massive scale and opportunity of the domain and look forward to exploring and sharing more insights on deploying an IoT solution in my following posts. Stay tuned.