IoT security, analytics, device management, low-power, short-range IoT Networks and WAN, make up some of Gartner's top ten list of IoT technologies that every organisation needs to keep an eye on in the next two years.
“IoT demands an extensive range of new technologies and skills that many organisations have yet to master. A recurring theme in the IoT space is the immaturity of technologies and services and of the vendors providing them,” Gartner vice president and analyst, Nick Jones, said.
“Architecting for this immaturity and managing the risk it creates will be a key challenge for organisations exploiting IoT. In many technology areas, lack of skills will also pose significant challenges."
Here are the Top 10 IoT technologies:
- IoT Security
Security technologies will be required to protect IoT devices and platforms from physical tampering and information attacks that attempt to encrypt devices communications, and to address new challenges such as the impersonation of ‘things’. IoT security will be complicated by the fact that many ‘things’ use simple processors and operating systems may not support sophisticated security approaches.
2. IoT Analytics
IoT business models will exploit the information collected by ‘things’ such as attempting to understand customer behaviour, to deliver services and intercept business moments. As data volumes increase through 2021, the needs of the IoT may diverge further from traditional analytics.
3. IoT Device Management
Tools must be capable of managing and monitoring thousands and perhaps even millions of devices. Management includes software updates, diagnostics, crash analysis and reporting, physical management and security management.
4. Low-power, short-range IoT Networks
Low-power, short-range networks will dominate wireless IoT connectivity through 2025, outnumbering connections using wide-area IoT networks. However, commercial and technical trade-offs mean that many solutions will coexist with no single dominant winner and clusters around certain technologies, applications and vendor ecosystems will emerge.
5. Low-power, Wide-Area Networks
Traditional cellular networks don't deliver a balanced combination of technical features and operational cost for those IoT applications that need wide-area coverage combined with relatively low bandwidth, good battery life, low hardware and operating cost, and high connection density.
The first low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) were based on proprietary technologies, but in the long term emerging standards such as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) will likely dominate this space.
6. IoT Processors
The processors and architectures used by IoT devices define many of their capabilities, such as whether they are capable of strong security and encryption, power consumption, whether they are sophisticated enough to support an operating system, updatable firmware and embedded device management agents.
An understanding of the implications of processor choices will demand strong technical skills.
7. IoT Operating Systems
Traditional operating systems such as Windows and iOS were not designed for IoT applications. Consequently, a new range of IoT-specific operating systems have been developed to suit different hardware footprints and feature needs.
8. Event Stream Processing
Some IoT applications will generate extremely high data rates that must be analysed in real time. To address such requirements, distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) have emerged.
9. IoT Platforms
IoT platforms bundle many of the infrastructure components of an IoT system into a single product. The services provided by such platforms fall into low-level device control, data acquisition and application development.
10. IoT Standards and Ecosystems
Standards and their associated APIs will be essential because IoT devices will need to interoperate and communicate and many IoT business models will rely on sharing data between multiple devices and organisations.
