Before you know it, we might have clothes that automatically change color and patterns or farms that run themselves. Exploring the possibilities of IoT, enterprises are pushing the limits of what technology and use cases are currently available to realize its true potential.
IoT may be the next big thing, but for businesses, the next big hurdle will be to find ways to architect it. Gartner predicts that 75% of IoT projects will take twice as long as planned. That is partly because it is complex to deploy. Assuming that your organization is adopting IoT, you will need to establish resources, business use cases, processes, and have a dedicated person to overlook the entire project, from PoC to reality.
Even though you have done your groundwork, there could be multiple starting points for an IoT journey. To deploy enterprise-grade IoT at scale within a company, the challenges are far more than what it takes to put together a PoC:
- Managing endpoints: Traditionally, your organization might have had a few data points to collect information from. With the arrival of IoT, enterprises will have to access several data points and process their information in real-time.
- Separating signal from the noise: The introduction of many data points will result in data inflation. To tackle this rise in data, businesses will require a means to determine data relevancy, i.e., what information is vital for which business function or process.
- Building a data science strategy: Enterprises will have to make data science and machine learning a mainstream activity and equip themselves with the necessary tools/resources to drive better business results.
- Ensuring flexibility: Your company will need adaptive, resilient systems that scale autonomously, support changing connections, and stand up to the huge ebbs and flows in data.
- Handling multiple technologies and vendors: While building solutions, an increasing challenge is acquiring the ability to manage compatibility issues with different technologies, firmware, vendors, and establishing standard machine-to-machine protocols.
- Bringing Connectivity and security: To cater to decentralized data and IoT networks, a diverse set of security measures including, identifying critical IoT assets, vulnerabilities, threats and a centralized team to develop strategies to respond quickly is required.
According to a survey by Cisco, 60% of IoT initiatives stall at the proof-of-concept (PoC) stage, and only 26 percent of companies have had an IoT initiative that they considered a complete success. A holistic IoT approach would be to execute implementation as a series of tasks instead of revamping the entire business.
As IoT is not an off-the-shelf solution, you will need to work with many technologies and vendors to put together a systematic end-to-end system. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind:
- Utilize your organization's existing knowledge and assets
- Collaborate with experienced partners
- Establish an iterative development cycle improving the quality of production
- Recognize devices or behavior patterns that might become a threat
Planning and partnering are critical to a successful deployment of an IoT strategy. The same study by Cisco shows that organizations with the most successful IoT initiatives used partners at every phase, from strategic planning to data analytics after rollout.
Overcoming the complexities of IoT implementation
IoT will require individual elements in the system to connect, coordinate and communicate with each other as well as the existing infrastructure. Having the right platform that is standards-based, scalable, and secure will be a key differentiator.
Infusing a new way of thinking and not just relying on new technology, HARMAN's comprehensive set of secure IoT solutions are powerful assets, empowering business to move forward with confidence. All elements of our solution are devised to work together, from IoT gateways and data storage to middleware and analytics. Accelerating automated actions taken based on data gathered from connected devices, we make deployment of the Internet of Things practical.
Whether you are a small developer or a large company, our insight-driven strategies will help in taking the complexity out of implementing the Internet of Things. Knowing that your IoT solutions will often live for decades, we engineer systems with a perspective on long-term sustainability.
For those who want to lead, let us simplify your IoT deployment including, prototyping, device configuration, authentication and implementation support.
If you would like more information, please feel free to write to us at askhcs@harman.com.
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