DevIQ's Internet of Things (IoT) Way

IoT devices and technology can be utilized by businesses to reduce costs, increase productivity, optimize products, improve customer experience, and increase mobility and agility.

Technology is continuously changing. The opportunities to learn and grow are endless. The potential to find new solutions, because of technological advancement, affects all industries and all aspects of life. One of those technologies includes devices or machines that support Internet of Things (IoT). With IoT, people can use automation to allow devices or machines to handle mundane tasks or create an integrated environment that addresses your needs before you even realize there is a need. People use the example of smart homes to optimize energy efficiency and cost savings by tracking and monitoring energy usage over time and adjusting energy usage to optimize cost and energy. However, IoT devices can be anything from a smart refrigerator, garage door opener, home HVAC controller, Security Cameras, Apple Watches, Self-driving cars, and temperature control thermostats. I like the definition of IoT as, “Any device or machine that uses sensors and software to collect data and exchange it over the Internet, enabling remote monitoring and control.”

IoT Uses

IoT devices and technology can be utilized by businesses to reduce costs, increase productivity, optimize products, improve customer experience, and increase mobility and agility.  IoT devices are often used to monitor operating costs and usage to reduce costs and ensure efficiency. The main goal of IoT devices is to collect data and utilize the data to make informed decisions to achieve desired business goals. IoT allows the use of advanced analytics to identify new opportunities to achieve business goals. Businesses are often using IoT informed AI chatbots to address customer communication to reduce costs and improve customer experiences. Mobility and agility are increased by IoT device distribution and connectivity. Employees can work remotely while accessing data from distributed devices. Employees can receive real-time notifications as data becomes available from devices. Together with integrated experience and real-time data analytics, IoT allows businesses or individuals to optimize and make decisions to make improvements.

IoT Industry Size

According to Statista, revenue is growing by Billions as illustrated below:

• As of mid 2024, there are over 15 billion connected IoT devices worldwide 
• The number of active IoT devices is expected to double by 2030 
• Greater China has more than 5 billion IoT devices 
• Approximately 2 in 3 devices use IoT 
• Remote asset monitoring is the most popular use case for IoT 

Source:  Exploding Topics 

Source:  Statistica

IoT Challenges

There are some challenges for IoT. The biggest concerns include: 

Security: Hardening and security IoT devices and preventing unauthorized access to data is critical. While this is the most important, utilizing strong network firewalls or cloud security groups can go a long way to protecting data. Utilization of remote data wiping, when physical devices are compromised, is essential.  

Interoperability: Communicating with different devices with different standards and protocols is a significant challenge. When choosing a partner ensure devices use similar standards and protocols. At DevIQ, we have a lot of experience supporting (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) MQTT enabled devices.  

Scalability: Ensuring that more IoT devices are added data ingestion and consumption can match the scale of data. While ensuring the data is secure and meaningful.  

Data management: It is important to have efficient and scalable data storage to handle the large amounts of data coming from IoT devices. A data lake is only usable if the data is accessible quickly and efficiently.  

Power management: These devices are often battery powered, so it is important to ensure devices have a sustainable power source.  

Regulatory Compliance:  Devices must adhere to regional or international standards 

Cost Management: Deployment of new devices can be costly, realizing cost optimizations after initial collection of data may not be immediate.  

Network infrastructure: Having a strong and reliable network connection to devices is essential. Infrastructure upgrades may be necessary to support device ingestion of data.  

Talent Shortage: There is a notable talent shortage in the IoT sector. The need for qualified data analytics and hardware engineering is essential. Understanding how to read data from devices and potentially move data to the cloud or other storage locations is an emerging skillset. According to the Savannah Group, based on study from Inmarsat, only 20% of companies or organizations have the necessary skillsets to integrate with IoT devices. In 2021, there was a million personnel deficit between talent and demand. With the increased demand for IoT devices, there has likely not been a decrease in the talent deficit.  

Source:  Savannah Group

DevIQ's IoT Expertise

DevIQ has supported numerous clients with IoT devices and helped clients achieve insights as well as both performance and cost optimizations. DevIQ focuses on Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which relates to collections of sensors, instruments, and autonomous devices connected through the internet to industrial applications. IIoT emphasizes improving safety and efficiency for production sites. As opposed to Consumer IoT which includes smart wearables, smart home devices, voice command systems, and others emphasizing services for consumers, DevIQ existing experience allows us to quickly meet any IoT needs.  From smart lighting to industrial energy insights, we have supported data ingestion, data lake creation, and data consumption to gain valuable insights. We have achieved real-time data ingestion from sensor technology and uploaded them to an AWS Timestream database. We are familiar with both AWS and Azure IoT cloud services and technologies. 

The potential for IoT development and integration is endless. Recently, I explored a personal project to gather temperature and humidity data from my home office. Using a Raspberry Pi 4 and a basic Temperature and Humidity sensor from Amazon. From there, I connected the device to AWS IoT Greengrass and subscribed to a topic to read data in real-time. IoT Greengrass can easily be enabled to trigger a Lambda to send the data to any storage solution such as AWS RDS, S3, DynamoDB, or AWS Timestream. Once in the storage solution, data analytics solutions, such as AWS Managed Grafana or OpenSearch can be integrated to query and visualize the data.  The data allows someone to make informed decisions to measure corrective actions. IoT devices enable people to gather data and act to better their lives.  

Summary

The demand for IoT devices continues to grow. These devices allow us to create an integrated environment that saves time and gives us information to improve our lives. While the challenges for managing and maintaining IoT devices are significant, the learning curve to understand and address these challenges is attainable. There is a growing community of individuals and software development consultants that can help address IoT challenges and achieve IoT goals. IoT devices are fun to develop and are an excellent opportunity to learn and try something new. If there is a boring task you wish to eliminate, perhaps you can gain more insight and completely avoid the tasks with an IoT device. There are many use cases for IoT devices from smart homes and cities to manufacturing and agriculture.  

To learn more about DevIQ’s IoT experiences and how we can help gain and leverage your data, contact DevIQ here.

Mark Garnick, Software Engineer

DevIQ, July 2024