Innovations in IoT will prevail, despite the difficult economic climate
The digital boom of the pandemic and new working practices have created a major increase in smart device usage. Yet this increase is tempered by supply chain issues and economic woes due to climate change and the war in Ukraine, says Shahed Mazumder, global director of telco solutions at Aerospike.
These combined factors will significantly change the burgeoning IoT market in differing ways. According to predictions from Forrester, IoT and infrastructure investments to lure people back to big cities will fall flat in 2023, while reduced spending by consumers and industry on IoT will slow. Conversely, IoT-enabled food production will achieve a meaningful scale due to both extreme weather and war1.
Despite this mixed bag IoT continues to grow. In Western Europe, according to Gartner, the IoT endpoint installed base is expected to grow by 8.3% between 2021 and 2023. While this is much lower than in some emerging economies including Sub-Saharan Africa, where growth is predicted to be 17.8%, Europe started this decade from a much higher base2.
Against this mutable backdrop, it’s important to look at the IoT trends that will emerge in the year ahead and the underlying technologies that will help to bring them to fruition.
Supporting scale is vital
As IoT installations grow so does the need for persistent real-time, at an unlimited scale, with low-latency, and at an affordable cost. IDC figures suggest that in the next two years, 30% of all data (175 ZB worldwide, IDC Data Age 2025) will not only come primarily from IoT sensors but will also be in real-time. And regardless of which sector is using IoT, there is a demand for real-time data processing at scale.
The use of IoT is enabling more efficient and resilient infrastructure, giving companies the power they need to accelerate and drive innovation. What is exciting is that IoT sensors and endpoints are being incorporated into increasingly sophisticated and massive-scale use cases, so the pressure is on to ensure IoT-based projects are future-proofed.
But it’s not just massive data processing that IoT ecosystems need. The ability to shift the data at any time and from any location in real-time with virtually no intervention is also vital. This is why Cross Datacentre Replication (XDR) has become important in mission-critical IoT data management. It supports filtering flexibility to determine the directions in which data attributes flow. Network costs can be reduced by using strong filtering to lower data volume reduction in transit. Speed is also a consideration, so a replication feature must work rapidly so it doesn’t become a bottleneck for data processing. The most important job for IoT is that it can preserve data integrity.
XDR-like features can remove the reliance between sensor data collection points and data analysis points, which can be either on the edge or in the core an aggregation point at which data comes from different edge sites.
All essential IoT use cases need to happen in real-time. It doesn’t matter if it’s data collection, aggregation, analysis, or taking action, it should be taking place in the sub- to low-millisecond range and XDR-like features enable this.
So let’s have a look at how IoT is being assimilated in different industries:
Utilities
Despite the complex operating environment, the utilities sector in Europe enjoyed strong revenue in 2022 and operating profit growth. However, the sector is lagging in terms of digitalisation. There are various reasons, including regulation that hampers competition, a lack of investment funds, and an aging workforce. But it does create an opening for the adoption of IoT technology. A report from MarketsandMarkets says that spending in the IoT utility market should grow to $53.8 billion (€50.77 billion) by 2024, compared to $28.6 billion (€26.99 billion) in 2019, and some of it should be directed at digitalising the sector.
Outages could be minimised, for example, if real-time data from IoT sensors were utilised. Grid operators would have access to immediate changes in energy usage levels allowing them to take action immediately to manage energy availability. Equally, a water leak could be identified and rectified reducing the cost to the water companies and minimising disruption.
With more investment in infrastructure we could see improvements in data capture and processing, demand forecasting, predictive maintenance using AI, data retention, and restoration, all of which would be interconnected into a fully cohesive model. With the very hot summers we are now experiencing in Europe combined with winter storms that can cause flooding and affect powe3r supplies, this level of digitalisation is very overdue.
Oil & Gas
The oil and gas industries have already adopted IoT and are using sensors to collect a wide range of data points. Apart from collecting and analysing data to get an accurate view of processing within facilities, sensors have long been relied on to reduce energy consumption and grow profitability.
IoT helps to create the connected architecture that allows data to be routed to systems, applications and other devices but the challenge is lowering the latency of those connections so that decision making can be informed in real-time. Connectivity helps but the goal should be to make the lag between point A and point B almost non-existent. This will allow the power of IoT to really come to the fore.
Healthcare
Shahed Mazumder
Finally, the healthcare industry. Connectivity is essential in this sector, and this was proven by the many different use cases that came to light during the pandemic. Telemedicine is just one of the better known uses, but others that are enabled by IoT include remote monitoring where sensors are worn by patients and their readings are sent to medical practitioners for analysis. This is particularly beneficial for patients with chronic health problems or who are at risk of a health crisis which is best mitigated by constant supervision. It also means that by managing conditions, people can continue to live their lives without the need for hospitalisation.
There are many more industries that over the next year will take huge leaps forward by putting in place an IoT ecosystem. Regardless of the ongoing challenges we face in terms of the economy and the geopolitical situation, the drive to modernise systems is strong across multiple sectors. By combining sensors and devices in a real-time edge, core, cloud data infrastructure, with all the AI/ML capabilities of analytical tools, IoT has the power to transform productivity, efficiency and profitability, and what business would not welcome that?
- Forrester Research, Predictions 2023: Edge, IoT, And Networking by Michele Pelino, Julie Ask, Andre Kindness, Paul Miller, Danny Mu with Stephanie Balaouras, Jack MacPhee, Diane Lynch
- Gartner Research, Forecast: Internet of Things, Endpoints and Communications, Worldwide, 2021-2031, 4Q22 Update Kay Sharpington, Chad Eschinger, Peter Middleton and Akshay Deshpande
The author is Shahed Mazumder, global director of telco solutions at Aerospike.
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