Looking at the Internet of Things (IoT) today, we have 35-40 billion installed devices, and this number is increasing fast. But how did the technology get us here, and how can we ensure this growth will continue?

Over the last 10 years, four big things made this possible:

We have attained almost unlimited cloud infrastructure,

We are surrounded by mature wireless data networks, which are fast, reliable and inexpensive,

Most of us carry round smartphones and connected computers in our pockets every day, and

We now have billions of low-cost, powerful connectivity solutions that can be deployed anywhere and adopted by almost any segment, including embedded, consumer and data center.

We’re seeing huge benefits from the IoT in many sectors. In retail, for example, supermarkets are using electronic shelf labels, freeing up their staff from having to change them manually. This makes it easy to update prices frequently, and create new opportunities for promotions and targeted offers.

But let’s not rest on our laurels. What must we do, as an industry, to take the IoT to the next level? To drive the IoT forward, we must focus on:

Accelerating software,

Securing products,

Connecting teams, and

Empowering data governance.

Many of the future challenges for the IoT are about software, not hardware. Real-time operating systems (RTOSes) are a key building block that we’ll need to create secure, maintainable and portable products that we can deploy at scale.

An RTOS provides an underlying framework that enables consistent connection to the cloud. It also includes features, such as over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates, that enable products in the field to function for 25 years or longer.

Next, let’s think about security in the context of embedded devices.

Chips must be secure and protected against physical attacks—so that nobody can read your data within the chip, or tamper with it. We also need a way to securely connect to the cloud, using protocols that have been vetted and using technologies like key exchange authentication and encryption.

So, for the IoT, we need end-to-end secure connectivity from chip to cloud. I don’t care what your application is, or how low cost and low power it is—you must still ensure that it’s secure.

Some people believe embedded is somehow different from other computing sectors—and that it won’t have to run authenticated code to know the remote device can be trusted.

This idea will disappear: Over the next 5-10 years, we’ll see the proportion of embedded systems running globally on this trusted software model go from a small percentage to probably 100%.

My third point addresses how we manage the teams of people we work with will matter.

There are two kinds of teams operating in most companies today in our sector: device teams building the physical products and cloud software teams working to manage that device over its lifetime.

How do we go about connecting the device and cloud teams? We must do better here.

The embedded world tends to try using tiny, power-constrained devices programmed at a bare-metal level, but that makes updates years later incredibly difficult. Instead, we should use an RTOS with enough memory and performance, and we should ideally containerize the embedded development.

Finally, the IoT is all about data. We’re collecting a ton of it, and it’s growing year by year. How are we managing that data? And what should we be doing differently?

Many times, there’s just a simple use case with this data but there’s so much more that you could do with it. Good data governance will get the most out of the data and keep all that information safe.

If we can do these four things in a big way, the IoT will achieve that trillions-of-dollars impact to the global economy we’ve all been talking about.

By: DocMemory
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