A good business person is a good opportunist. He always looks for the opportunities to fill the market. And every wise businessperson keeps his eyes on past, present and future. From the past, he learns the opportunities he missed, he looks at the current scenarios to find out where his competitors are lacking and looks into the future for the gaps that will be created between demand and supply.
Today, most of the technologists have their eyes on IoT, as it has the potential to touch 50 billion things by 2020 – claims a study. It is going to be configured with most of the things people commonly use. Also, as IoT still is in the developing phase, it has potential for both the Red Ocean and Blue Ocean market openings. Hence, people who can create technology are focusing on innovating, and the people who want the share in the market are building resources to manufacture products as soon as technology hits the market.
It is not difficult to observe that every capable organization is going to extend its segments into IoT market. But, as the competition is going to be very tough, there are some perceivable difficulties every marketer is going to face, and hence remains their responsibilities to prepare themselves to quickly enroll into the market.
Among many of the difficulties the following are a few of the complications that the market as a whole is going to encounter:
Standardization of IoT
The rapid evolution of IoT has fostered into number of various solutions. Every organization is trying to create their own platform and their own methods; it is creating a tangle of podiums. Furthermore, large amounts of investments have been gained by the startups within this field.
As the focus has been remanded on the innovations of the IoT, and to touch more and more devices, attention towards the standardization of products have been lost by the developers. To achieve the standardization of the IoT as a whole, working on different parts of IoT technology is important. These parts include Platform, Connectivity, Business Model and Applications. To successfully achieve the standardization, all these parts must be standardized.
In this race of creating new IoT solutions, if priority is not given to standardization, there will be a situation where consumers would find it difficult to choose the most appropriate vendor for them, which is a downfall for every solution provider. Hence, it became very important to set a standard in the IoT commerce.
Managing the Infinite Data
When the Internet of Things was first coined, everyone believed it would be the technology focused on the devices or things, but now everyone is realizing that this phenomenon deals with data more than the things it is used for. The data produced from all the devices and processing on the relevant data, will be more of an issue. Furthermore, for storing this high stream of data, technologists will need to create an ocean.
Also, generated large quantities of data by IoT deployments will be needed to be analyzed and processed in real time. Processing such large quantities of IoT data will increase as a proportion of workloads of data centers, leaving providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges.
Security, A Myth
They say that until people died from car accidents, airbags weren’t discovered. Society in the timeline, where it is still facing cyber threats, is planning to connect all its devices to the internet. Additionally, more software layers, more integrations, more platforms and more connecting technologies will be experienced with IoT, which will further degrade the security of devices and data stored.
Insecure Web Interface, Insufficient Authentication/ Authorization, Lack of Transport Encryption, Insecure Software/Firmware, Insecure Network Services, Insecure Cloud Interface, Insecure Mobile Interface, Insufficient Security Configurability, Poor Physical Security, etc., are the security concerns that comes with the IoT solutions, which is first needed to be taken care of before the IoT boom hits the world.
Erasing the line discerning Privacy
Things will not be connected to each other directly, but via third party platform, which raises the privacy concerns of the consumers.
For instance, to configure homes with IoT to make them smart homes, people need to provide their data to service vendors. And, people are insecure to provide this data. Furthermore, the insurance companies may fetch data from cars, about driving habits and places they visit, which people are not comfortable to provide. People are also concerned that the connected devices may be hacked and the homes or cars may be invaded by the hackers. Hence, gaining the consumers’ confidence is one of the biggest challenges the developers are going to face.
Cogitating the Regulations
As there will be many devices connected to each other via different platforms, Government regulations will be necessary for the technology providers. But currently no concrete laws are present, which raises many questions among the technology developers. These complications are so oblique that, the manufacturers are not even sure whether in the future, governments will issue new laws or extend their current IT laws.
The makers must realize that some of the laws are present and can be modified which concerns the segments like: Consent, Privacy by design and default – to ensure that the default position is the least possible accessibility of personal data, Profiling – clearer guidelines on when data collected to build a person’s profile, Privacy policies, Enforcement and Sanctions – violations of data privacy obligations.
With these complications, some of the market philosophers, even claimed that the IoT is nothing but a hype. But when the people get a glimpse of prosperity, they tend to mend all the barriers in their way. And many of the most powerful businesses have already invested in the IoT market in the hope of a fortune, which assures that all the complications will be solved in the coming years.
