Guest Post: Top 6 Internet Of Things (IoT) Technologies

Internet of Things is here and is set to demand an extensive range of skills and new technologies, which will take many companies much time to master. One theme that tends to rear its head quite often is the immaturity of services and technologies and of the many vendors that provide them. A vital challenge for organizations that look to exploit IoT will be architecting for this immaturity while managing the risks that are created by it. In other technological areas, we can see how lack of skills will also present its own challenges.

The principles and technologies of IoT are set to have a significant impact on organizations of today, affecting risk management, business strategy and a wide range of other technical areas, such as network design and architecture.

Now, Here Are The Top 6 IoT Technologies Today:

IoT Security
Security will be and is a vital technology, used for protecting IoT devices and platforms from physical and informational attacks, it does this through encryption of data, and by addressing challenges such as the impersonation of “things” or denial-of-sleep attacks which are designed to drain a device’s batteries. One thing that is set to complicate IoT security, however, is the fact that many of these devices (or “things”) use very simple processors and operating systems which may or may not support the various complex security platforms.

Short-Range, Low-Power IoT Networks

When it comes to selecting a wireless network for an IoT device, you need to consider many factors such as range, bandwidth, and life of the battery, operational cost, density and endpoint cost. We can predict that short-range, low-power networks will be the most widely patronized IoT connectivity at least for the next 7 years, outnumbering connections from other IoT network types. However, due to the technical and commercial trade-offs, we could see a situation where many solutions will be working alongside one another, with no real winner, with many emerging clusters around certain applications, technologies, and ecosystems.

IoT Processors

The architectures and processors that you will find inside these IoT devices, will determine their capabilities, such as, whether or not they are able to support strong security approaches and encryption, their power consumption level, whether or not they are able to support an operating system, whether their firmware can be updated, and device management agents. As is typically the case with hardware design, you have those complex trade-offs, between the cost of hardware, software, feature set, upgradeability and so on. Due to this fact, an understanding of processor choice and its implications become very pivotal.

IoT Device Management

Monitoring and managing will be requirements of those nontrivial “things”. This includes things such as software upgrades, device monitoring, firmware, crash reporting and analysis, diagnostics, security and physical management. There are also many additional or new problems that are brought to the management task by IoT. Tools need to be designed with the capabilities of monitoring and managing thousands and in some cases even millions of different devices.

IoT Operating Systems

The operating systems that we are all too familiar with, such as iOS and Windows are not designed for IoT applications. This is because they consume a considerable amount of power, require very fast processors, and in many instances, lack the features, such as real-time response, just to name one. The memory footprint for these operating systems is also much too large for these IoT devices, and the chips used by the IoT developers may also be unsupported. As a result of this, there is a range of IoT-based operating systems, which are designed to suit the feature requirements and hardware footprints.

IoT Platforms

With an Internet of things platform bundle, within a single product, you are getting all the infrastructure components. The services that we can expect from these platforms are said to fit into the following categories:

1) Low-level device operations and control, such as device monitoring, communications, security, management, and firmware updates.
2) Internet of Things transformation and management, and data acquisition.
3) Internet of Things application development, which includes application programming, analytics, event-driven logic, and adapters, which are used for connecting systems.

Author Bio: Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website compuchenna.co.uk.