In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a lot of traction as it plays a primary role in any business development. From autonomous vehicles, automatic response sensors, smart machines to smartwatches, the technology has fetched the era of a connected world where each device is connected. IoT devices also have the potential to drive today’s smarter cars, homes, factories, and cities. However, as the number of connected devices anticipated to excel beyond 30 billion by 2020, the possibilities to leverage IoT technologies to redefine industries and societies will also amplify.
By leveraging IoT technologies companies are achieving profits into their operations. This technology can advance customer service and experience, increase business and workplace safety, augment business and revenue opportunities, assist in analyzing consumer behavior, improve productivity levels and add to competence.
In a Cognizant survey, enterprises that adopted IoT have reduced supply chain costs by more than 20 percent, enhanced productivity by 10-20 percent, and decreased design-to-market time by 20-50 percent. Though, the survey also revealed some key challenges companies face during the IoT implementation, including IoT security, integrating disparate data, lack of IoT skills, among others.
Here are the ways companies can embrace to maximize the advantages of their IoT implementation.
Robust Planning with Edge Computing and Analytics
Since edge computing and analytics garner, pre-process and filter data to deliver dense, rich and accurate data, it can assist in reducing transmission, processing and storage costs, in turn. Many digital products need to be autonomous in their operation, allowing them to accomplish the required safety, reliability, and user experience needs. Thus, edge computing provides the ability to have local storage and local computation. It can enhance the security and privacy of an IoT application, as an edge-processing system can send commands to IoT devices and perform software upgrades in a few milliseconds, compared to a cloud system.
Secure and Efficient Device Management
The increasing use of IoT sensors and the augmenting intricacy and volume of data exchanges have made it essential for businesses to adopt and apply the best of security practices and procedures. Doing so, they must look at investments, talent and thought leadership around IoT security. Also, they must look at device management, enabling devices to communicate seamlessly with other devices and cloud platforms while assisting the enterprise scale to billions of connected devices and trillions of messages. Effective device management can ease the barriers of collecting, storing, assessing and combining data from endpoint devices. This will, in turn, lessen management costs.
Redefine Data Ingestion and Stream Processing
As the process of amassing, storing, integrating and analyzing data is critical to the successful implementation of IoT, data ingestion and stream processing here can help the organization by restructuring this process. It assists in effective IoT implementation by bringing in and altering telemetry data into a format that can be utilized by cloud-based IoT services. The process also helps in evaluating the expected data message size, criticality and required response time to make sure the cloud components can process the data required to meet business IoT goals.