What IoT Landscape Will Look Like in 2017

These opinions are expressed by Umesh Puranik (LinkedIn), Principal Architect at Persistent Systems. 

Security of IoT deployments will take center-stage. The impact of attacks on IoT systems is moving from annoyance to damage (infrastructure, financial, lives, etc.). There will be a big emphasis on security as a fundamental requirement in IoT designs. At present, there are no real standards related to IoT security but guidelines and recommendations are being created by standards bodies and organizations. IoT security testing/auditing services could become a viable line of business. (Security may point out different priorities for different IoT domains – for example, privacy of data in wearables, integrity and availability of data/systems in industrial deployments, etc.)

Device lifecycle management and security of it is still a challenge in the real-life IoT deployments. This coupled with interoperability could prove to be the biggest set of hurdles for widespread adoption of IoT systems in some of the segments like home automation and industrial IoT. There will be stronger efforts on arriving at a set of standards to address these issues in order to consolidate the fractured segments.

Read More: Our Review of Oakter Smart Home Automation Kit

The movement towards edge computing will gain momentum because of the data volumes and velocities even from smaller IoT deployments. The availability of mature and newer platforms with support for hardware-based security, more processing power and ability to communicate with multiple protocols will result into gateways that also work as edge computing modules.

Many competing platforms with similar features developed by major players are available now. These platforms are still evolving and it will be a long time before one or more of those emerge as the most widely adopted/deployed platforms. However, in a near future, most of those platforms may develop the ability to work with other platforms in a collaborative manner. This will be facilitated in part APIs provided by the platforms and in part by the adoption on some of the protocols as most supported protocols.