James Hogan of Vista Ventures recently brought together four leading industry minds and held an interactive Q&A session regarding the potential of IoT. The panelists were:

– Mac Devine, Vice President SDN Cloud Services and CTO, IBM Cloud Services Division
– Jeff Smith, CTO & EVP, Numerex

– Stephen Mellor, CTO, Industrial Internet Consortium
– Darin Andersen, CEO, CyberUnited

Following is the summary of what we learned from these industry leaders.

WHAT IS INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT)?

Some connection to the internet + sensors + devices + some sort of real-time analytics. Thus, it is the unprecedented convergence of sensors, devices, the internet, and real-time analytics. All things are connects relatively simply through blue tooth, devices, and sensors.

WHAT IS THE MAIN CHALLENGE IN COMMUNICATING THE BENEFITS OF IoT?

It is to provide privacy assurance to the users. Secondly, it is to communicate the business value of IoT.

WHAT ARE THE SECURITY VULNERABILITIES IN IoT?

They are both at Hardware & software end. On the hardware, side potential hacks into hardware and how the product is encrypted will be important.

On the software side, password attacks and software attacks to break into IoT will be the most important things to manage.

WHAT ARE THE EXPECTATIONS OF ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS WHEN ADOPTING IoT?

When enterprise customers move to mobile, it changes the required expectations. Providing near real-time instant services becomes the priority. Demand for doing things in real-time is increasing through sensors. Making localized responses is also important.

WHAT SHOULD IoT INDUSTRY EXPECT?

Lots of M2M (Machine-to-Machine) interaction.

Security and privacy may have an impact when applying an IoT solution. IoT uses data in new ways, the data you have control over and data you do not control. Managing and controlling the capacity of the new data becomes an issue.

WHAT ARE THE IMPORTANT NEW CHALLENGES IN IoT?

Data residency requirements: The use of data will become like a natural resource. China is putting regulations on foreign firms regarding which data to send outside the country.

Data residency issues escalates in an IoT ecosystem. Data hosted in some countries and accessed in other countries may create governance and compliance issues. The aspect of overlays, the ability to localized access, and compliance are important.

HOW ARE THE DATA KEYS AND IoT SECURITY RELATED?

From the perspective of a key, if the data is highly encrypted it can be anywhere, it is data important or the keys that encrypt so data is not important until it is un-encrypted

You can’t deliver everything locally. What is important is making sure is to have the right security in place so you can maintain governance over data

Data residency is narrow; someone controlling a factory from far. So, if the control is adequate and responsive, managing it from afar should not be a problem.

WILL IoT INCREASE THE POLITICAL ROLE OF DATA?

Data can be used as a powerful political and technical tool. You will see new complexities in particular in Middle-East China and Russia. Data will be treated as a strategic national asset.

The Western countries will have to look at where they are deploying their operations. Recent signaling by China that companies have to provide data captured in a process implies that solutions should be implemented keeping long-term considerations in the plan.

WHICH INDUSTRIES WILL MOST AGGRESSIVELY — USE IoT? 

Healthcare, transportation, smart city, and insurance businesses will drive the IoT.

WHAT ARE THE BIG DRIVERS OF IoT?

Monetization: It is important how organizations can monetize the IoT ecosystem, crossing the operational technology domain and information technology domain, optimizing local operations, and ensuring the consistent real-time flow of information from the operational domain to the CIO.

Business models will be another big driver of IoT. The trend will be to leverage tech that already exists and improve machine learning. On the internet, people are the main data collectors and machine captures, how we train machines to collect data and real-time data analytics will be more important. We’ll see the convergence of multiple technologies.

Share your thoughts on how you see IoT being implemented in the S&M companies.