The accumulation of data and the belief that it can benefit business profitability, customer experience, and society’s general quality of life drive the IoE. Now, people are revising existing methods and creating new processes around a rapidly expanding network of digitized things to optimize and improve business, government, and societal outcomes.
IoE is the fourth-evolutionary phase of the Internet. It leverages the digital communication channels established in the networked connectivity phase, the commerce tools created in the networked economy phase, and the multiple means of collaboration—including popular social media platforms—developed and embraced in the networked emerging experiences phase.
In this book, we discussed how the exploding growth of networked, connected devices forced attention from IT, manufacturing, health care, and retail groups among others to define and design for IoT. Those networked things also carry embedded sensors and processing capabilities to orchestrate commands, locally process results, and push data and results to the designated data storage systems. These new data sources can yield many new insights; it is the role of the services industry to help its clients uncover and leverage this new information effectively.
IoE unlocks additional value by uniting people, processes, data and things. Though the influx of data, much of it unstructured, and the secure delivery and retrieval of that data are formidable challenges, the increase in operating efficiency and unearthed value deliver the ROI justification for the IoE investment. Services organizations have clear roles in scope definition, process interrogation, legacy migrations, and IoE systems operation. However, services organizations can make more substantial impact and ramp client relevance by influencing and driving device or thing programmability standards and by developing industry heuristics for process improvement with IoE. The ability to understand the business process or operations and the information needed to evaluate it is of great value to all companies with diverse operations and geographies. IoE as a multilayer ecosystem of hardware and software components will allow various enterprises to capture its value and maintain their leadership or competitive edge. More importantly, it will allow them to uncover new interactions and capabilities that generate new markets and opportunities.
Cloud technologies to store and process data into useful information are vital components in the IoE architecture. At the same time, IoE is transforming the cloud by reconfiguring its composition to bring data processing and analysis closer to the cloud edge in a fog layer to distribute, assess, and act on the torrents of data streaming from devices, sensors, and other newly digitized and connected things.These connections would have never scaled with IP version 4 (IPv4). IP version 6 (IPv6) delivers 128-bit addresses, which yields billions upon billions of possible device addresses for connecting the previously unconnected. IPv6 is an essential building block for the IoE.
For IPv6, circuit miniaturization and electronic component cost reductions enable and ignite IoT and IoE, but the accompanying challenges are substantial. The scalability, reliability, security, and manageability challenges offer many opportunities for technology services industry to innovate solutions and provide meaningful benefits to their clients.
IoE fosters new services in a variety of areas. Some services assess the functionality of current systems and identify components to digitize and connect in a prioritized fashion based on readily accepted measures. Other services map data sources and devices, their attributes, and interconnection points in a taxonomy of digital capabilities, which allows process owners to identify and fill functional gaps. Also prospecting services cross-correlate data sources and uncover nuggets of interrelatedness among device or thing attributes that spur positive process changes.
Finally, the transition to IoE brings sizeable security challenges due to the sheer number of new devices connecting to networks, the range of new system interconnects, and the slate of new protocols needed to connect and interconnect these devices to the network, with each other, and to other systems. Organizations benefiting from IoE must consider, devise, and execute plans for physical security of facilities, processing lines and devices, tamper-evident device construction, and strong data cryptography.