But the sense is that it simply wouldn’t be cost-effective, according to Filkins. An IT mega-giant like Google or Microsoft could, in theory, target a particular IoT vertical, acquire existing companies for their operational know-how, and offer a floor-to-ceiling, say, medical-device management system. IT companies have been aggressive in partnering up with OT companies, and there’s a general recognition that most complete IoT solutions will involve products from multiple vendors. “More than anything, we’ve matured past the early confusion, ambiguity and hyperbole,” he said, “to understanding that it’s a whole bunch of different technologies across dozens of use cases in dozens of markets.”Īnd what that implies is an even greater degree of collaboration throughout the IoT sector. What’s coming, according to Renaud, is a more pragmatic understanding of what IoT means. One of the keys to securing the IoT, he said, is the use of behavioral analytics on the network – even if individual IoT devices remain difficult to secure, a machine-learning-based system that recognizes malicious traffic – what he calls the “Why is my sensor calling the Ukraine?” problem – could help address the problem. “If you want, you need to bring the price point down on all those sensors, and that affects security,” Filkins said.Ĥ51 Research vice president Christian Renaud said that despite the fact that there’s a growing recognition that the security issue is very serious, the sheer volume of new endpoints and types of endpoints flooding into the market in the next few years makes a serious breach all but certain. Such companies are used to delivering value for money. The companies that make most of the sensors for IoT are companies that have experience in their particular area – oil drilling equipment makers, industrial vendors, medical device manufacturers, and so on. The divide between IT and OT is one of the central causes of the security problem. “You’re putting hundreds of thousands of low-cost, high-risk devices on the network.”

“IoT is a massive challenge for an IT admin,” he said.

From the standpoint of the IT networking professional, implementing IoT can be like actively inviting security breaches, according to IDC senior research analyst Patrick Filkins. The main issue, of course, remains security. What this means from a practical standpoint is that, most of the time, no single vendor is able to offer a complete solution to a given IoT problem and, therefore, unable to solve the broader issues with IoT technology in a unitary way. Part of the problem, according to experts, is that there are still two distinct, recognizable types of vendor competing in the IoT market: IT companies with plenty of technological expertise but little hands-on operational experience, and established vendors across the various verticals without much IT sophistication. That means ongoing security woes and a lack of complete solutions are most of what can be safely predicted for the coming year. Yet despite the explosive growth – one widely cited prediction from Gartner says that the number of enterprise and automotive IoT endpoints will reach 5.8 billion in 2020 – the IoT market’s ability to address its known flaws and complications has progressed at a far more pedestrian pace. Much of the hyperbole around the Internet of Things isn’t really hyperbole anymore – the instrumentation of everything from cars to combine harvesters to factories is just a fact of life these days.

Hyperbole in the pedestrian