Organizations have been increasing the rate at which they adopt IoT technologies in 2020 as a direct response to Covid-19, deploying remote management and secure connectivity of devices to enable new applications and services, remotely, or to improve data insights from remote, deployed sensors and equipment.
However, with this rapid push to scale comes the need to accommodate device types’ heterogeneity, diverse system structures and multi-region activation. The challenge faced by those managing deployments of this diversity and scale will lead them to streamline their processes through a single operational view that securely connects and manages their devices.
In 2021 will see more organizations taking advantage of this approach, which will, in turn, enable them to evolve their application capabilities and improve the reliability of their devices through enhanced operational visibility and the ability to evolve in-field device capabilities and services.
Anyone working from home in 2020 knows how productivity is impacted when bandwidth and latency become an issue. Organizations feel the same pain and are evaluating how they can build resilience into infrastructure and supply chains. It’s triggering them to move proofs-of-concept around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) at the edge of their networks into full-scale deployments.
Although the edge computing market has existed for decades, it is forecast to have a major growth spurt, rocketing 30 percent a year from $3.2 billion to $44 billion by 2030. Meanwhile, the Internet of Things (IoT) Business Index 2020, a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), shows that over 10 percent of manufacturers have doubled their IoT investments over the last three years, and 64 percent are between the early and advanced stages of IoT planning or implementation.
But it’s not just Covid-19 that’s responsible for this uptick; new technologies will remove complexity and increase adoption. Cloud-native edge application enablement, leveraging secure gateway container orchestration and device management, builds secure, resilient systems necessary to distribute hybrid cloud-edge applications and manage downstream IoT devices.
The elements for secure orchestration of third-party applications, remote management of gateways, and integration with legacy devices are now available in single solutions, enabling an explosion in processing at the IoT edge, without the cloud-only inherent bandwidth and latency limitations.
These advances allow us to deploy more IoT sensors to feed AI-based applications that can analyse and act upon, real-time data, helping us identify anomalies and trends in complex data sets that help form actionable insights sooner.
These insights are only of value if they are trusted, and a timely or relevant example is the World Health Organization reporting a five-fold increase in COVID-19-related cyber attacks. These attacks may have exploited an unsecured connected device, meaning trust must be established in companies leveraging digital transformation to become fully operational and mitigate the effects of a future pandemic.
The pandemic has prompted us to improve our processes, build resilience, and expedited technological advances. We all hope that mass vaccination will bring this chapter to a close, but the benefits of streamlined IoT estates processing trusted data at the edge will be felt for years to come.
Charlene Marini is chief product and marketing officer at Pelion. Pelion enables customers and partners to “securely connect and manage IoT devices and obtain valuable insights from aggregating their physical and digital data”.
