It’s time to adopt a unified approach to IoT

Early adopters of IoT rushed to market with intelligent but verticalised solutions that solved a single use case. This resulted in a complex patchwork of solutions to meet the growing number of use cases in companies. It’s not uncommon to find a single company with five or more isolated IoT solutions, each with siloed data, connectivity and device management. Now, with hundreds of thousands of implementations saturating the market, it’s time to move to a more harmonised IoT ecosystem by investing heavily in managing these various IoT solutions.

At the centre of this challenge is the interpretation and different implementations of common standards in the IoT ecosystem:

• Device management: Although device manufacturers generally provide a device management platform alongside their hardware, these devices are usually only compatible with the manufacturers’ own devices. The result is ‘vendor lock-in’, where the customer is stuck with a solution from a single vendor, or the proliferation of multiple systems to manage the variety of devices needed to fulfil the customer’s use cases. The impact of this approach is felt not only by back-office teams, who have to manage all the platforms, but also at the point of installation, where installers have to switch between tools and approaches to install sensors from different manufacturers. This often results in unsuccessful installations, returns to site and a return to manual tracing to complete the job.

• Connectivity management: Kaleido’s IoT Enterprise Connectivity 2023 survey, conducted among more than 800 companies to understand their connectivity needs, found that 65 per cent of respondents with mobile-connected IoT devices also had non-cellular IoT devices, and each of them had an average of more than one additional connectivity technology in their device fleet. These technologies need to be reconciled and unified at some point in the flow of operations so that they are included in the same transport and data flow.

• Application integration: The value of IoT technology becomes truly transformative when the data generated can be converted into action, unleashing business transformation. Converting IoT data into action normally takes place at the application layer, where data is combined with other data sets to produce insights that trigger actions. However, with data coming from a mix of solutions, the fragmentation of connectivity and device management can lead to highly compartmentalised data silos, increasing friction and the time needed to reconcile and combine data, if it can be done at all.

So, with these challenges in mind, in order for a company or its suppliers to achieve efficient control and management of the entire IoT fleet, a specific toolset is needed that can not only incorporate these different technologies into the same system, but also provide seamless integration with the customer’s core business systems – only then can the data generated by the IoT sensors be acted upon.

Ensuring that data can be transformed and transported securely between systems should be a primary interest, to ensure that various sources can be combined to create more complete pictures of operations. After all, it is at the application layer that the true potential of IoT is revealed, with different data being combined and analysed to generate actions within the monitored system.

Solutions that aim to achieve true data comparability to fully unlock the promise of IoT need to go beyond side-by-side integrations and basic API queries and offer a harmonised approach that understands IoT data and metadata, incorporating device lifecycle management, application data handling and standardisation.

Having a set of tools focused on bringing together hardware and software, connectivity, IT and OT for a unified IoT operations function can be a solid foundation for developing other applications and insights without the complexity of managing various types of devices and technologies in isolation.

With the emergence of agnostic IoT management tools comes the potential to deliver IoT at scale, efficiently and with the ability to truly focus on the company’s objectives. These systems can then go beyond examining a single element of the operational stack and provide end-to-end visibility and management of the IoT implementations required, regardless of the technology or vendor.