Gartner Identifies Top 10
Strategic IoT Technologies and Trends
Analysts Explore Internet of Things
Opportunities and Pitfalls at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018, November 4-8 in
Barcelona, Spain
Gartner, Inc. today highlighted the top
strategic Internet of
Things (IoT) technology trends* that will
drive digital business innovation from 2018 through 2023.
“The IoT will continue to deliver new
opportunities for digital business innovation for the next decade, many of
which will be enabled by new or improved technologies,” said Nick Jones, research vice president at Gartner. “CIOs who master
innovative IoT trends have the opportunity to lead digital innovation in their
business.”
In addition, CIOs should ensure they have the
necessary skills and partners to support key emerging IoT trends and
technologies, as, by 2023, the average CIO will be responsible for more than
three times as many endpoints as this year.
Analysts discussed how CIOs can lead their
businesses to discover IoT opportunities and make IoT projects a success
during Gartner
Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through
Thursday.
Gartner shortlisted the 10 most strategic IoT
technologies and trends that will enable new revenue streams and business
models, as well as new experiences and relationships:
Trend No. 1: Artificial
Intelligence (AI)
Gartner forecasts that 14.2 billion connected
things will be in use in 2019, and that the total will reach 25 billion by
2021, producing immense volume of data. “Data is the fuel that powers the IoT
and the organization’s ability to derive meaning from it will define their long
term success,” said Mr. Jones. “AI will be applied to a wide range of IoT
information, including video, still images, speech, network traffic activity
and sensor data.”
The technology landscape for AI is complex
and will remain so through 2023, with many IT vendors investing heavily in AI,
variants of AI coexisting, and new AI-based tolls and services emerging.
Despite this complexity, it will be possible to achieve good results with AI in
a wide range of IoT situations. As a result, CIOs must build an organization
with the tools and skills to exploit AI in their IoT strategy.
Trend No. 2: Social, Legal and Ethical IoT
As the IoT matures and becomes more widely
deployed, a wide range of social, legal and ethical issues will grow in
importance. These include ownership of data and the deductions made from it;
algorithmic bias; privacy; and compliance with regulations such as the General Data
Protection Regulation.
“Successful deployment of an IoT solution
demands that it’s not just technically effective but also socially acceptable,”
said Mr. Jones. “CIOs must, therefore, educate themselves and their staff in
this area, and consider forming groups, such as ethics councils, to review
corporate strategy. CIOs should also consider having key algorithms and AI
systems reviewed by external consultancies to identify potential bias.”
Trend No. 3: Infonomics and Data Broking
Last year’s Gartner survey of IoT projects
showed 35 percent of respondents were selling or planning to sell data
collected by their products and services. The theory of infonomics takes
this monetization of data further by seeing it as a strategic business asset to
be recorded in the company accounts. By 2023, the buying and selling of IoT
data will become an essential part of many IoT systems. CIOs must educate their
organizations on the risks and opportunities related to data broking in order to
set the IT policies required in this area and to advise other parts of the
organization.
Trend No. 4: The Shift from Intelligent Edge
to Intelligent Mesh
The shift from centralized and cloud to edge
architectures is well under way in the IoT space. However, this is not the end
point because the neat set of layers associated with edge architecture will
evolve to a more unstructured architecture comprising of a wide range of
“things” and services connected in a dynamic mesh. These mesh architectures
will enable more flexible, intelligent and responsive IoT systems — although
often at the cost of additional complexities. CIOs must prepare for mesh
architectures’ impact on IT infrastructure, skills and sourcing.
Trend No. 5: IoT Governance
As the IoT continues to expand, the need for
a governance framework that ensures appropriate behavior in the creation,
storage, use and deletion of information related to IoT projects will become
increasingly important. Governance ranges from simple technical tasks such as
device audits and firmware updates to more complex issues such as the control
of devices and the usage of the information they generate. CIOs must take on
the role of educating their organizations on governance issues and in some
cases invest in staff and technologies to tackle governance.
Trend No. 6: Sensor Innovation
The sensor market will evolve continuously
through 2023. New sensors will enable a wider range of situations and events to
be detected, current sensors will fall in price to become more affordable or
will be packaged in new ways to support new applications, and new algorithms
will emerge to deduce more information from current sensor technologies. CIOs
should ensure their teams are monitoring sensor innovations to identify those that
might assist new opportunities and business innovation.
Trend No. 7: Trusted Hardware and Operating
System
Gartner surveys invariably show that security is the most significant area of technical concern
for organizations deploying IoT systems. This is because organizations often
don’t have control over the source and nature of the software and hardware
being utilised in IoT initiatives. “However, by 2023, we expect to see the
deployment of hardware and software combinations that together create more
trustworthy and secure IoT systems,” said Mr. Jones. “We advise CIOs to
collaborate with chief information security officers to ensure the right staff are
involved in reviewing any decisions that involve purchasing IoT devices and
embedded operating systems.”
Trend 8: Novel
IoT User Experiences
The IoT user experience (UX) covers a wide range of technologies and design
techniques. It will be driven by four factors: new sensors, new algorithms, new
experience architectures and context, and socially aware experiences. With an
increasing number of interactions occurring with things that don’t have screens
and keyboards, organizations’ UX designers will be required to use new
technologies and adopt new perspectives if they want to create a superior UX
that reduces friction, locks in users, and encourages usage and retention.
Trend No. 9: Silicon Chip Innovation
“Currently, most IoT endpoint devices use
conventional processor chips, with low-power ARM architectures being
particularly popular. However, traditional instruction sets and memory
architectures aren’t well-suited to all the tasks that endpoints need to
perform,” said Mr. Jones. “For example, the performance of deep neural networks
(DNNs) is often limited by memory bandwidth, rather than processing power.”
By 2023, it’s expected that new
special-purpose chips will reduce the power consumption required to run a DNN,
enabling new edge architectures and embedded DNN functions in low-power IoT
endpoints. This will support new capabilities such as data analytics integrated
with sensors, and speech recognition included in low cost battery-powered
devices. CIOs are advised to take note of this trend as silicon chips enabling
functions such as embedded AI will in turn enable organizations to create
highly innovative products and services.
Trend No. 10: New Wireless Networking
Technologies for IoT
IoT networking involves balancing a set of
competing requirements, such as endpoint cost, power consumption, bandwidth,
latency, connection density, operating cost, quality of service, and range. No
single networking technology optimizes all of these and new IoT networking
technologies will provide CIOs with additional choice and flexibility. In
particular they should explore 5G, the forthcoming generation of low earth
orbit satellites, and backscatter networks.
www.gartner.com
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