What is IoT? The internet of things explained

Many IoT providers are offering machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to make sense of the collected data. IBM’s Watson platform, for instance, can be trained on IoT data sets to produce useful results in the field of predictive maintenance — analyzing data from drones to distinguish between trivial damage to a bridge and cracks that need attention.  

IoT and business applications

Business uses for IoT include keeping track of customers, inventory, and the status of important components. Here are examples of industries that have been transformed by IoT:

• Healthcare: IoT devices can monitor patients and transmit data to health care professionals for analysis. IoT can also monitor the health of medical equipment, as well as enable telehealth.

• Oil and gas: Isolated drilling sites can be better monitored with IoT sensors than by human intervention.

• Industrial IoT, energy and construction: Any industry with physical assets, mechanical processes and supply chains can benefit from the mission-critical information that IoT devices can deliver.

• Brick-and-mortar retail: Customers can be micro-targeted with offers on their phones as they linger in certain parts of a store.
• Agriculture: The use of IoT sensors to monitor environmental conditions such as moisture in the soil, light exposure and humidity enables the agriculture industry to adjust to changing climate conditions. In addition, self-driving tractors and the use of drones for remote monitoring helps makes farms more efficient.

IoT security and vulnerabilities

IoT devices have earned a bad reputation when it comes to security. PCs and smartphones are “general use” computers are designed to last for years, with complex, user-friendly OSes that now have automated patching and security features built in.

IoT devices, by contrast, are often basic gadgets with stripped-down OSes. They are designed for individual tasks and minimal human interaction, and cannot be patched, monitored or updated. Because many IoT devices are ultimately running a version of Linux under the hood with various network ports available, they make tempting targets for hackers.

Recent IoT security breaches are enough to keep any CISO awake at night. Here are just a few of the known IoT security incidents from the past few years.

As troubling as those incidents are, IoT security risks could become even worse as edge computing expands into the mainstream and advanced 5G networks roll out features, such as Reduced-Capability (RedCap) 5G, that are intended to spur the accelerated adoption of enterprise IoT.

“Obviously, more endpoints mean that attackers have a greater attack surface to exploit, and security teams must manage many more risks,” said IDC analyst Jason Leigh. There is a saving grace, however, that may inadvertently limit IoT risks. “With constrained devices, it’s difficult to get complex malware through them,” Leigh said. “Additionally, new networking specifications (such as 5.5G) include details about security components that can be deployed at the network level to reduce risks,” Leigh said.

History of IoT

A world of omnipresent connected devices and sensors is one of the oldest tropes of science fiction. IoT lore has dubbed a vending machine at Carnegie Mellon University that was connected to ARPANET in 1970 as the first Internet of Things device, and many technologies have been touted as enabling “smart” IoT-style characteristics to give them a futuristic sheen. But the term Internet of Things was coined in 1999 by British technologist Kevin Ashton.

At first, the technology lagged behind the vision. Every internet-connected thing needed a processor and a means to communicate with other things, preferably wirelessly, and those factors imposed costs and power requirements that made widespread IoT rollouts impractical, at least until Moore’s Law caught up in the mid-2000s.

One important milestone was widespread adoption of RFID tags, cheap minimalist transponders that can stick to any object to connect it to the larger internet world. Omnipresent Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G wireless networks make it possible for designers to simply assume wireless connectivity anywhere. And the rollout of IPv6 means that connecting billions of gadgets to the internet won’t exhaust the store of IP addresses, which was a real concern. (Related story: Can IoT networking drive adoption of IPv6?)

What’s next for IoT?

As the number of IoT devices continue to grow, companies will continue to improve security features and look to faster connectivity options, such as 5G and faster Wi-Fi, to enable more functionality for getting the data processed and analyzed. Additional collaboration between IT and operational technology (OT) is also expected. IoT will continue to grow as smaller companies get in on the action, and larger enterprises and industry giants such as Google and Amazon continue to embrace IoT infrastructures.  

It won’t be long before connected devices, transmitting data to edge data centers, where AI and machine learning perform advanced analytics, becomes the norm. Just as we no longer talk about “smartphones” and simply refer to phones, as IoT becomes ubiquitous we will soon drop the “smart” in smart home, smart factory and smart city.