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IoT Challenges
IoT Challenges- IoT is now widely regarded as a transformative force. According to Juniper Research, by the end of 2020, there will be 38.5 billion devices connected to the internet — a growth rate of 285% since 2015.
But as more devices interconnect, the number of malfunctions will only increase. This is an unresolved issue, even outside of security. For example, based on the data from Juniper, even if 2-3% of devices were to have performance issues, that would be 500 to 750 million devices.
The Juniper report notes that users have reported at least 1.2 problems daily. These scales will overwhelm IT support and operations teams. Finding a problem quickly and trying to fix it faster just won’t work, and simple automation tends to break down.
According to a Vanson Bourne survey (via IoT Now), roughly 3 out of 4 CIOs fear IoT performance problems “could derail ops and hurt revenues.”
After working in the IoT space for the past five years and interacting with several players across the spectrum, I have observed a few reasons for operational failures within IoT. Here are six operational challenges that come with IoT:
1. Granular Configurations
The edge has many granular configurations that are personalized and connected via APIs. These often require manual settings, configurations and interventions.
2. Network Limitations
In the era of sensor- and machine-generated data, the size, complexity and attributes of the workload will attain massive scales. In the absence of large-scale edge network implementations today, incoming workloads can overwhelm devices, and network limitations create performance problems at scale. A high density of IoT devices also increases network congestion. There is also lack of presence detection in certain realms of IoT where everything must traverse through a smart hub or router. As a result, logging, monitoring, reporting and other operational functions will quickly get beyond humans.
3. Workload Issues
Network limitations and bandwidth constraints are constantly on the rise. The proliferation of more devices adds to the load. Many IoT features require lower latency to effectively use and will require either local servers or service providers to provision new bandwidth and QoS for workloads with unique requirements. This will become costly to implement even without factoring in the human cost of operations.
