Internet of Things

If you’re in the manufacturing sector, you need to learn when and where your products should be equipped with IoT sensors so they can provide real-time information to a central monitoring application. Devices that automatically schedule repair appointments before a refrigerator or air conditioner fails can improve customer satisfaction. They also allow you to gather hard information to improve a product faster and hopefully prevent a recall.

Forming a strategy around IoT requires that you consider how information flows into and out of your company's systems. IoT effectively creates the need for near real-time information exchanges between your customers and the products and services you offer them. It also requires that you realize most applications were never designed to integrate with the diversity of devices or the volume of data available today. In addition, testing all the interfaces and use case scenarios is difficult, if not impossible.

Furthermore, this new onslaught of connected devices changes the product development landscape. Historically, the gap between knowing how a product or service is used and a company’s ability to improve it lay solely with the customer. Unhappy customers would call, send you an email to complain about a service, or let you know about a problem. Your ability to intercede and correct the situation before the customer became dissatisfied, or worse, hurt themselves, was almost non-existent.

While there are a lot of good things that come from IoT, there is also a downside. All this connectivity comes with an increased security risk. Monitoring access to packets of information and connection through APIs is difficult even when you know the connection points. It’s more difficult when you have to use open APIs. If not architected correctly, applications and databases can be vulnerable to all the added connections. Finding ways to lock down networks and throttle connections is the next challenge for infrastructure and security professionals.

Every business, and every CIO, needs to build IoT enablement into strategic planning. No matter your industry, you will be affected by the use of IOT in internal operations and customer-facing products.

Who knows? Maybe someone will come up with an IOT device that can predict the next crisis you’ll need to deal with and give you more than a few hours to resolve it.