Security and Analytics Among the Top Emerging IoT Trends

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Security, analytics and device management will have a major effect on the nascent Internet of Things (IoT) technology market next year and the one after that, according to market research firm Gartner.

The analyst group identified ten technologies that will help organizations fully unlock the IoT’s potential in 2017 and 2018. Naturally, creating and maintaining a secure ecosystem of IoT solutions looms large over Gartner’s list.

“Experienced IoT security specialists are scarce, and security solutions are currently fragmented and involve multiple vendors, new threats will emerge through 2021 as hackers find new ways to attack IoT devices and protocols, so long-lived ‘things’ may need updatable hardware and software to adapt during their life span,” said Gartner vice president Nick Jones in a statement.

IoT analytics will start to come into its own. “New analytic tools and algorithms are needed now, but as data volumes increase through 2021, the needs of the IoT may diverge further from traditional analytics,” stated Gartner.

The sheer scale of IoT deployments will give new meaning to device management. IT pros and their tools will need to monitor, configure and patch thousands, perhaps millions of devices. To connect their “things,” enterprises will be increasingly investing in low-power short-range and wide-area networks. Proprietary low-power wide-area networking standards will begin give way to Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), predicted Gartner.

Rounding out the rest of the top ten list are IoT processors, event stream processing, platforms, standards and operating systems. Of the latter, Gartner noted that today’s desktop and mobile operating systems are a poor fit for the IoT.

“They consume too much power, need fast processors, and in some cases, lack features such as guaranteed real-time response. They also have too large a memory footprint for small devices and may not support the chips that IoT developers use,” stated Gartner.

While these technologies will help IoT deployments get off the ground, they can crash back to Earth if enterprises lack the required skillsets.

“The IoT demands an extensive range of new technologies and skills that many organizations have yet to master. A recurring theme in the IoT space is the immaturity of technologies and services and of the vendors providing them,” stated Jones.

“Architecting for this immaturity and managing the risk it creates will be a key challenge for organizations exploiting the IoT,” he continued. “In many technology areas, lack of skills will also pose significant challenges.”

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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