CHALLENGES OF INTERNET

1. Security & Safety

Security is the key element of any technology and IoT still has some more - big - steps to take. With millions of things already connected to the web and billions set to become connected in the future, operational technology security providers will have to work hard to ensure malware doesn't penetrate your smart meter or your fridge.

Carl Leonard, Principal Security Analyst at Websense, said: "...the real threat from IoT will likely occur in a business environment over consumer. Every new internet-connected device in a business environment further increases a business attack surface.

"A main reason for these concerns is that the devices themselves are often in vulnerable locations, may have very little physical protection, and the networks through which they communicate can't always be trusted."

"This makes them a prime target for malicious hackers and cyber-criminals. It's not just about the devices themselves, it's also the back-end systems, the points of aggregation where data from millions of devices is collected and analysed - where decisions get taken and instructions issued.

"Compromise at the centre could drive breaches the scale of which we've never seen before. Building trust across these huge scale, distributed systems must be a main priority for companies seeking to implement a successful IoT adoption strategy."

2. Data Management

Let's be clear: without data there is no IoT. Data is the petrol of this industry and it needs to be kept safe and managed to ensure users benefit from everything IoT, and other services have to offer.

In a world where everything is connected there will be tonnes of data floating around. But there is always the risk of that data being misused stolen, as well as services providers not being able to cope with so much information being created 24/7.

To store this data we have data centres. The old system for data centres has been converted via virtualisation. But even though this model is pretty recent (at a larger scale), companies are already looking into the next big thing: the cloud.

Large scale data deployment can lead to users becoming confused between data ownership and copyrights.

Like those nuisance calls we get almost daily, services providers will have to work hard in order to keep data away from third parties. Can you imagine your fridge sending you an ad alert to your phone about discount ice trays? Exactly. This kind of issue will be a reality if databases are not kept safe.

Currently, Big Data solutions by companies like MySQL and Hadoop deal with scale, capacity and processing tasks. In connection with other companies like Severalnines, software management is becoming ever easier. But the big challenge lies at the heart of IoT: so far IT has not had to deal with a unique dataset on its own. Current data makes it to databases the same way unstructured data does.

Fabrizio Biscotti, Gartner's research director, said: "Processing large quantities of IoT data in real time will increase as a proportion of workloads of data centres, leaving providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges."

"IoT threatens to generate massive amounts of input data from sources that are globally distributed. Transferring the entirety of that data to a single location for processing will not be technically and economically viable.

"Data centre operations and providers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management platforms that can include a data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) system approach of aligning IT and operational technology (OT) standards and communications protocols to be able to proactively provide the production facility to process the IoT data points based on the priorities and the business needs."

3. Battery Life

Like your phone or your tablet, devices need energy. We have become used to charge our phone on a daily basis, far from those days where the good old Nokia 3310 lasted for a week. Current wearables also have a limited battery life capacity. For example,  Gear Fit lasts just over three days.

Current systems will not be enough for existing IoT expectations and the industry will have to look into different options to charge devices. Solar energy is set to become the biggest trend. Installing slim and transparent solar panels on phones, cars and even buildings has already started providing consumers to keep going without ever having to worry about looking for the nearest plug.

Other technologies are being explored: for example, British company Perpetuum uses electromagnetic energy to recharge devices. The technology captures vibration via a magnet which traverses across a fixed coil creating a varying amount of magnetic flux.

Thermal and RF are also being introducing to power devices and stretch batteries' lives.

In the future, devices' battery life will have to run for years, and at the same time they will have the mission of saving costs and being green efficient. This is the challenge for enterprises: to find a balance between energy cost and efficiency of their devices. Something similar was achieved by ZigBee and its 6LoWPAN-based light switch which runs on coin cell battery for 10 years. WiFi based sensors have too been developed to run on 2xAA batteries or over a year.

Recently, researchers developed a new type of glass material that has the properties to double a smartphone battery life.

The energy puzzle is not complete without CPUs. The processing units are being pushed to a limit and are in need of further investigation. CPU consumption got aggravated by the rising number of IoT enabled devices signalling and sending data between one another.

     BY PHILIP TAMBA