All You Need To Know About Internet of Things (IoT)

I believe that you have heard about the term Internet of Things (IoT), and somehow you had questions about what is actually Internet of Things means, what are the benefits of it, and how this technology founded? On the other hand how about the advantages and disadvantages of it?

All these questions and more will be covered within this article, so let's start...

What is Internet of Things actually, is?

We can define the Internet of Things (IoT) as a network of billions of connected devices that are accessible to the Internet, which are exchanging data together, knowing that these devices using wireless connections. These devices allowing the organizations and personals to monitor, automate and control their different life activities in various sides.

So you can say that with IoT we add a type of intelligence and smartness to dummy devices such as bills, bulbs, or cars.

This is prompting numerous private and open division associations asking how they can utilize IoT to make significant worth. Some are utilizing it to convey new operational efficiencies. Remote resource the executives enables associations to follow resources progressively and make significantly more effective utilization of their field groups.

What are the usage of the Internet of Things?

The benefits for the Internet of Things are covering both business and personals (Home) categories, so in order to clarify these benefits we will divide them into two parts:

Personal/Home

• Maximize the security for home and more access controls
•  Flexibility to control appliances remotely and easily
• Gain visibility and monitoring capabilities
• Utilize the appliances and accessories efficiently and effectively

Business and Organization

• Improve productivity by utilizing monitoring and controlling to optimize different processes.
• Deep insight monitoring and analysis for recurring activities that will improve the different processes.
• Improve customer experience by being proactive rather than reactive to any issues
• Saving money and time due to utilizing the resources effectively and efficiently.
• Generate revenue by introducing additional value-added services depending on the features and flexibility that IoT provides.
• Minimizing Human Errors by depending on the deep and big data in addition to intelligence the IoT provides.

How does IoT works?

IoT devices are actually hardware components along with built-in sensors to collect data from surroundings and send this data to their gateway, these web-embedded devices also have the ability to act and take actions based on the analyzed data sent by this gateway. All these processes done automatically without human intervention.

The data sent by the IoT devices sent to the related gateway is either processed and analyzed locally or remotely in the cloud.  

History of IoT

The first time Internet Of Things principle mentioned was in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, the co-founder of Auto-ID Center.

At the same time, the first internet appliance mentioned was in 1980 talking about a Coke machine. It allowed us to check the status of the heat of drinks and when it would be ready.

Historically the term machine-to-machine “M2M” was used to define the concept of allowing the devices to communicate through a network and connected to the cloud without any human intervention. And today IoT is actually depending on M2M to add intelligence and smartness.

Recently in 2010 the system and the current concept of IoT developed and considered along with all related details and goals by China government and made it a strategic plan for the coming years.

Internet of Things and big data analytics

The number of connected devices to the internet are touching 20 billion devices, all these devices will be generating a big amount of data which is actually the most valuable asset that the business organization will have.

There are different types of data generated from the IoT devices collected from the sensors embedded in the hardware, either environmental, movement, or voice sources.

This as indicated before allows the vendors and manufacturers to get all this data, analyze it and improve the processes, in addition, to help in putting the correct plans and services that will meet the requirements of the customers. 

On the other side this data and the related reporting clarifying the behavior of the end-user and the real needs for him is actually a source of revenue for business analysis companies that other vendors and companies ask for it to build their business plans and products.

IoT Security and Privacy

Security is one of the main and important topics of concern regarding IoT. The importance of this subject is coming from the fact that IoT is actually entering every and single aspect of personal and business activity, collecting various types of data. So it is a major need to make sure that this data will be secure and protected.

At the same time, IoT devices have obstacles preventing them from being secure as these are devices not able to be patched with new software updates, so any known security bug will remain and leave them exposed for hackers. On the other hand, the communications between the IoT devices not providing any security features in terms of encryption of the data or basic access control capabilities.

On the other hand, IoT devices usually ask users to put their own personal and sensitive data such as an address, age, names, social media accounts, which leave these data available for the hackers easily or even being stolen by the manufactures of these devices.

 Regarding the business part, the risk even more as the IoT devices will allow hackers to detect easily these devices and target them with known vulnerability affecting the whole business network and the effect will be more if the sensors of these devices collect sensitive information about the environment of the business network. So within the organization, the IoT network should be isolated from the corporate network that contains sensitive data.

In the end, it should be clear that regardless of the flexibility and productivity that the IoT provides, we should consider the security and privacy risks it has, taking into consideration that hacking IoT will not allow the hacker to steal sensitive information or perform DDoS attacks, but this can also, affect the physical assets by manipulating temperature or activating the fire alarms within the organization. 

As a summary, IoT is the trend of utilizing the Internet network to maximum by introducing all the flexibility to both the home and corporates, in addition, to maximize efficiency. At the same time security and privacy is an important aspect that should be considered and while evaluating any products related to IoT security features are a must angle that we should consider