Technology

While it offers a wide variety of unique benefits, the IoT has the potential to introduce a number of security risks and challenges. The IoT devices themselves, their platforms and operating systems, their communications and even the systems to which they're connected all may be at risk. Security technologies will be required to protect IoT devices and platforms from both information attacks and physical tampering, to encrypt their communications and to address new challenges such as impersonating ``things`` or denial-of-sleep attacks that drain batteries. IoT security is complicated because many ``things`` use simple processors and operating systems that may not support sophisticated security approaches.

IoT business models will exploit the information collected by the ``things`` in many ways for example, to understand customer behavior, to deliver services, to improve products and to identify and intercept business moments. IoT constantly demands, however, new analytic approaches. New analytic tools and algorithms are needed already now, but as data volumes increase even more over the next five years, traditional analytics will need to be vastly improved to meet the ever-evolving needs of the IoT.

Selecting a wireless network for an IoT device involves balancing many conflicting requirements, such as range, battery life, bandwidth, density, endpoint cost and operational cost. Low-power, short-range networks will continue to dominate wireless IoT connectivity for the foreseeable future, far outnumbering connections using wide-area IoT networks. Commercial and technical trade-offs, however, mean that many solutions will coexist, with no single dominant winner and clusters emerging around certain technologies, applications and vendor ecosystems.

Traditional cellular networks don't deliver a good combination of technical features and operational cost for IoT applications that need wide-area coverage combined with relatively low bandwidth, good battery life, low hardware and operating costs and high connection density. The long-term goal of a wide-area IoT network is to deliver data rates from hundreds of bits per second (bps) to tens of kilobits per second (kbps), with coverage over a large area, a battery life of up to 10 years, an endpoint hardware cost of around $5 and support for hundreds of thousands of devices connected to a base station or its equivalent. The first low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) were based on proprietary technologies, but in the long term emerging standards such as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) will be predominant.

IoT platforms bundle many of the infrastructure components of an IoT system into a single product. There are three main categories of services: (1) low-level device control and operations such as communications, device monitoring and management, security, and firmware updates; (2) IoT data acquisition, transformation and management; and (3) IoT application development, including event-driven logic, application programming, visualization, analytics and adapters to connect to enterprise systems.