Challenges for IoT

For the IoT industry to thrive there are three categories of challenges to overcome and this is true for any new trend in technology not only IoT:

Technological Challenges of IoT:

This part is covering all technologies needed to make IoT systems function smoothly as a standalone solution or part of existing systems. There are many technological challenges, including Security, Connectivity & Longevity, Standards and Intelligent Analysis & Actions.

i. Security: IoT has already turned into a serious security concern that has drawn the baby monitors, smart fridges, thermostats, drug infusion pumps, cameras and even the radio in your car. These are signifying a security nightmare being caused by the future of IoT. So many new nodes being added to networks and the Internet will provide malicious actors with innumerable attack vectors and possibilities to carry out their evil deeds, especially since a considerable number of them suffer from security holes.

ii. Connectivity: Connecting so many devices will be one of the biggest challenges of the future of IoT and it will defy the very structure of current communication models and the underlying technologies. At present, we rely on the centralized, server/client paradigm to authenticate, authorize and connect different nodes in a network.

This model is sufficient for current IoT ecosystems, where tens, hundreds or even thousands of devices are involved. But when networks grow to join billions and hundreds of billions of devices centralized systems will turn into a bottleneck. Such systems will require huge investments and spending in maintaining cloud servers that can handle such large amounts of information exchange and entire systems can go down if the server becomes unavailable.

iii. Compatibility and Longevity: IoT is growing in many different directions with many different technologies competing to become the standard. This will cause difficulties and require the deployment of extra hardware and software when connecting devices.

Other compatibility issues are non-unified cloud services, lack of standardized M2M protocols and diversities in firmware and operating systems among IoT devices.

iv. Standards: Technology standards which include network protocols, communication protocols and data-aggregation standards are the sum of all activities of handling, processing and storing the data collected from the sensors. This aggregation increases the value of data by increasing, the scale, scope and frequency of data available for analysis.