IOT
Helping devices from different manufacturers talk to each is a major barrier to widespread adoption. Many attempts have been made to create communication standards for the IoT, with varying degrees of success, but no one has cracked it yet – particularly when it comes to ‘edge’ devices, aka the physical bits of kit which are out there in the world. Pilgrim agrees that standardisation across the architecture would be a good thing. “At the edge, when it comes to connectivity, in the cloud, and so on. There is a lot more standardisation than there used to be – and that’s really helpful ,” he explains. “But there’s still a long road ahead of us, particularly at the edge, where things are still a bit of a mess. “I think they will be messy for a long time because many different industries are involved, and they all have different requirements,” he continues. “So what might work well for a Linux class device, sitting on an Ethernet connection in a factory, might not work well for a battery-powered device sitting in the middle of a Texan field. It’s hard to do everything with one standard, which is why there are lots of standards. “As you get closer to the cloud, things get much more consolidated. We’re intrinsically cloud-based and can link with any source of data very easily because we don’t have to tangle with putting code on devices.”
He adds: “From the consumer side, I think IoT has and will continue to grow fast. Industrially, it has enjoyed similar growth, but it’s less visible. It has its challenges; the principal one being that IoT has become such an all-encompassing term that, in some ways, it’s meaningless. Saying you work on IoT is a bit like saying you work on the web. Everyone uses the web and, in the same way, pretty much every company uses a form of IoT. Our customers wouldn’t refer to themselves as IoT companies: they’re just people doing useful things in the world who happen to use IoT. “To the extent that IoT is a market, it is still at quite an early stage, Pilgrim concludes. “This can make it difficult for vendors and customers to find each other, but I think we’re seeing that starting to gradually settle out.” Whether a definitive description will ever be nailed down remains to be seen. For me, the most important consumer IoT systems are the ones that don’t exist yet. Smart lighting is one of the leading use cases at the moment"
The future of IoT The highly publicised use cases for IoT tend to focus on consumer products like smart home systems, as well as things like the Philips Hue lightbulb, which can change colour on command. While this is an opportunity for developers, Secure Thingz’s Haydn believes the consumer side is also one of the industry’s biggest challenges. “Industrial IoT makes a huge amount of sense, but I think people are still largely baffled by consumer IoT,” he points out. “I have a connected refrigerator, and it was fun for the first week, but now, I just open the door and put the milk in it. The explicit benefits for the consumer are not there right now.” He refers to research that shows 79% of consumers wouldn’t buy an IoT device because of security concerns. “Security is a big problem, as well as usability,” he says. “That means you need the right cloud back end: these things have to just work when you plug them in. “For me, the most important consumer IoT systems are the ones that don't exist yet,” he continues. “Smart lighting is one of the leading use cases at the moment, but it’s a bit nerdy – I’m a nerd, so I think I’m allowed to say that! “My eldest son was born prematurely, and my favourite example of a potential use case is the connected babygrow,” he adds. “You can already buy one and connect it to your phone, and that’s interesting. But what I really want is something that monitors saturation, breathing and movement, so that in the night, if the baby goes cold or stops breathing, the alarm clock goes off and all the lights between my room and the baby’s room come on. If IoT can evolve to that level of sophistication – and it’s easy for a consumer to set everything up – then consumer IoT makes complete sense,” concludes Haydn.
ABOVE Haydn Povey’s company, Secure Thingz , offers development tools to secure devices
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