So I’ll start with the question a few clients have asked me. What the heck is this internet of things all about and how will it affect me and my business? Well, firstly IoT stands for Internet of Things. Not as I’ve heard by some in the IT community "Internet of trash". I’ll explain why some in the IT and predominantly networking industry call it that in a little bit. So what does the internet of things mean? This is very hard if not impossible to classify; then it is any device connected to a network. Whether that is sensors measuring moisture and temperature in hospital beds or it is your new SAN solution. The applications of the IoT is all-encompassing, and that is what excites me so much about IoT. One of the big takeaways I’ve taken away from talking with IoT vendors such as Dell EMC, Ruckus and Cisco are that IoT discussions are not to be had with your traditional IT teams alone. It is to discuss with the wider business in conjunction with the IT department. Asking the business, what do you do really well? And how can we automate this process with the use of IoT technologies? Then IoT can deliver quantifiable results to the business and transform the way business work. Some of the more sceptical of you out there will say IoT is just marketing Spin and at best it's a load more devices with suspect security on my network. If I’m honest If you asked me a few years back I would have agreed with the internet of trash comment. Having seen in recent times, global distributed denial of service attacks harness the computing power of smart fridges and other smart home devices. So IoT needs to to be thought from a security standpoint when we look at implementing in production.
But there is so much potential for IoT. We just need to find the right question that we can solve with IoT rather than look at devices and try and find a problem they solve. Which I fear is the missing piece that will enable IoT uptake to explode.
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