Benefits and Challenges of IoE
Connecting and mining information from unconnected and untapped things instigates positive changes in business processes and outcomes.
New opportunities can be captured as they are created by two main changes: networking the previously unconnected data and utilizing previously unused data. The value and growth of IoE is created with these two capabilities: connectivity and data.
Many benefits of IoE are somewhat obvious and directly relate to being connected. For example, if a water smart meter is installed for reading water usage, then company technicians do not have to physically inspect the meter to record the reading; the water usage can be continuously measured. However, the benefits clearly do not stop there, and in fact, second, third, or higher order correlations make for innovative value creation.
Generalizing the example, we can say that outages detection, usage trending and baselining, seasonal adjustments, and fault remediation are some of the improved areas in the utilities sector.
These benefits do not come without a set of unique challenges. Going further with the water meter example, the readings of the meter can be tampered with in ways that were considered impossible before, thereby creating a security challenge. Additionally, if every sensor is suddenly sending data, there is the challenge of managing the new volumes of data.
Clearly, IoE imposes a different order of things and consequently brings additional challenges, which are further explored in the following sections.
Scale of Service Creation
The exponential growth in connectedness creates many different types of scaling challenges. The first one is scaling the massive volume of data. As we discussed in Chapter 1, processing needs to shift closer to the edges for decisions and actions to be taken before transmitting all the data, which often seems impractical. Scaling is a challenge when it comes to the number of connections as well as the amounts of data.
However, there are additional dimensions to the scaling challenges. That is, the diversity in the types of new services and dynamism in the rates at which they can be created, spawned, and instantiated.
Predictability and Reliability
Internet users expect a website to be available always. When we factor in the Internet of Things (IoT) and a number of sensors and things being connected, the playing field rapidly expands. Sensors are often battery powered and expected to last for years or even decades. Consequently, they are often in sleep mode, waking up intermittently. Traditional ways of managing devices cannot be applied to sensors and things.
Because it is expected that more and more things will be intermittently available, multiple standards development organizations are creating new protocols and methods to enable their management. This work is happening at multiple layers of the stack. They include wireless communications, long and short-range communications, mobile networks and devices, and various approaches to maximize different variables in the trade-off of power consumption, range of distance, and transfer rate. As a consequence, there is a proliferation of new communication protocols that optimize various scenarios, such as minimizing power consumption in favor of data rates and communication ranges. Certainly, reliability decreases as we increase the number of devices and data rates. But order-of-magnitude improvements are still being made.
Furthermore, many cases and scenarios necessitate reliable management, including centralized controllers. For example, home and building automation, health care, and smart metering require management access to things. While there are a number of candidate protocols, different criteria result in various communication protocol design principles. There are multiple ongoing efforts for standardization of IoT in several industry forums, including, in particular, connectivity for most scenarios.
User Experience
Users demand a certain quality of experience. However, traditional devices are not the only means by which users access connected value. Mobility is increasingly becoming the mainstream (and sometimes even the only) media. Similar user experience is expected no matter whether the user is accessing a service via his or her mobile phone, at a connected kiosk in a public area, at a smart endpoint (such as a smart automatic teller machine [ATM] or a connected point of sale [PoS] terminal), or say from his or her car.
It is both a challenge and an opportunity to provide a consistent user experience across a user’s devices and interfaces. On one hand, it might appear to be problematic to ensure a seamless user experience. However, when looking at it from both a user-center design as well as from simplification perspectives, a new viewpoint arises:
•It is the differentiator that provides a seamless interface across the platforms.
•Designing for the less detailed platform will bring simplicity to the more detailed and capable platforms and interfaces.
•A portable design can play to each interface’s and platform’s capability.
In particular, combining these three factors, we can see how, for example, designing for a mobile platform can result in a much better user experience in a desktop interface, a kiosk, or a TV.
Complexity
Tied to the previous element of user experience, the additional volumes of connected devices and data cannot directly translate to the user experience in increased complexity. In fact, the most successful services have simplicity as a core design principle. Designing with simplicity is different than managing complexity—and the former is the result of successfully conquering the complexity challenge.
Management
The increase in the number of devices and things connecting to the Internet brings multiple challenges. One of the most immediate ones is how to provide a scalable, secure, and real-time management layer for all these things. For example, how do we perform inventory management and essentially account for them? How to provide fault management for a new type of element connected to the Internet, one that, as we have seen, could turn itself off to conserve energy? If a sensor is not responding, is it sleeping or is it broken?
On taking a different perspective, the quality of data collected and retrieved from the thing population is a key concern.Often, this raw device data is incomplete with missing or partial data fills. As this raw data is acquired via device push or system pull, the IoE system must process, interpolate, predict, fill, and flag missing and manufactured values.Metadata describing the omission marking scheme and algorithms calculating simulated data fills are required by information processing systems so that they can signal the validity—and degree of uncertainly—of the statistics and recommendations they produce.
Data Integration and Reconciliation
As mentioned in the previous chapter, data is the source of the new currency. However, to make data usable, we need to integrate and reconcile varied data sources from previously unconnected and disparate systems. This is, again, a challenge as well as an opportunity.
To perform this data reconciliation, data virtualization systems should be created. The objective of data virtualization is to abstract the underlying data and provide a single unified view and application programming interfaces to the upstream consumers of the insights generated. In this way, the system not only provides data but also the right context for better decision making. Better decision-making is the monetizable improvement created by IoE.
Security
Security is probably the biggest, the least understood, and the most underestimated challenge. Yet, it is likely the most important.
Basically, IoT and the IoE greatly increase the attack surface and create new or increase existing attack vectors. A few reasons for this are as follows:
•Interconnected systems: IoE transforms separate closed systems into Internet Protocol (IP)-based networked systems.
•New devices: From the whole universe of new devices introduced by IoE, smart meters and wearables are just the beginning.
•New protocols: The IoT stack creates new capabilities and new attack vectors.
The impact on security is shown in Figure 2.1, where new opportunities create new threats because of the increased surface of attack.
Additionally, when cybersecurity exposure, threads, and attacks bleed into the physical world, the impact is compounded because it is no longer just information theft and unwanted repurposing of software applications but an issue of the control and misuse of physical devices such as control valves and pumps that are now connected to the Internet.
Figure 2.1 Increased surface of attack
New things need protection, and that is an opportunity. This opportunity is unchartered, and it tests the known boundaries of the security. Identity takes a new meaning with devices. When the Internet is attached to the real world, physical protection and anti-tampering become critically important. When a sensor is battery-powered for decades, its supplied cryptographic protocols must be equally resilient to protect the sensor from malicious attacks throughout its operating life.