Why the Future of IoT is Open Source

IoT is a third wave of internet technology and a locomotive of open source ideas. After World Wide Web connected computers, and the mobile revolution connected people to the internet and each other, IoT interconnects everything that can collect data. Although the majority of smart cups , smart bottles and smart clothing do not yet provide any meaningful feedback to their owners, they paved the way for greater changes in everyday life. Which way is IoT going to take in 2018? Is it true that the future of IoT is in open source? Here are some predictions.

Demand for Advanced Analysts

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the number of connected devices will reach 28 billion by 2020, the amount of data they will harvest will grow exponentially. Only one-third of those devices will be computers, smartphones, and tablets. The remaining two-thirds are going to be things that weren’t traditionally internet-connected, such as household appliances, automobiles, sensors, terminals, etc. Some of those can process the data they harvest. However, most were designed only to collect. IoT is expected to offer highly advanced connectivity to devices, systems, and services, going beyond machine-to-machine communication and covering a variety of protocols and applications.

Some experts argue that such amounts of data will be too much for humans to handle and therefore, the adoption of AI for processing is imminent. It is true. The tools to help us manage big data and elicit valuable insights must become more sophisticated. Of the huge amounts of information, currently, only about 1% is getting processed to provide meaningful feedback.

Cooperation and crowdsourcing can (or rather should) be an alternative route the analytics will take. To provide value to the end user, an AI needs a vast amount of human-verified data to make sense of the new information. Training an AI could be either open source or extravagantly expensive and time-consuming.

Users Will Have to Choose Ecosystems

As the number of connected devices grows, so does the number of compatibility issues. Unfortunately, IoT becomes more and more disjointed, as every appliance manufacturer creates its own ecosystem of devices and software. As much as we all wish to believe in the all-connected future, we should draw our conclusions on the precedents.

Even the World Wide Web, while connecting computers and users, spawned several separate ecosystems. Things that seemed self-evident in one ecosystem work differently in the other. Therefore choosing the right one becomes even more important when your entire smart home or your business depends on it.

Therefore, users are more likely to skew towards open source. The customers become increasingly hesitant to bet the future of their IoT ecosystem on proprietary software or hardware with proprietary protocols. They fear that these will become obsolete too soon or will be difficult to customize.

The role of open source developers is balancing this tendency with technology that can decentralize IoT and put all those fragmented ecosystems together. The likes of it are already being developed – IBM‘s blockchain-based ADEPT, which uses the database to build a distributed network of devices. ADEPT (Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry) taps into this source to provide a secure, low-cost way for devices to interact.

We should be aware, however, that there will always be some data that are more sensitive than other. For example, users will demand more additional protection for e-banking applications or services where confidentiality is crucial, such as term paper help websites. Therefore, such services will always tend to develop their in-house software and will be reluctant to join the common ecosystem.

IoE

In 2018 the IoT will continue to grow to become the IoE the Internet of Everything. IoT is not a unified market . Therefore, the growth will not be equally distributed. The most promising fields in 2018 are healthcare and retail.

The buzz that IoT created revolves mostly around home and consumer electronics. These are still the testing area for every technological innovation before business adopts it. IoE will provide companies with more insight into how consumers relate to their products or services, customer care units, and one another. Chatbots, hospitality robots, and virtual assistants already can converse in real-time, and provide certain services, giving us a sneak peek into what IoE could be in the future.

Healthcare is slightly more interested in implementing IoT than other industries on average. 87% of healthcare organizations plan to introduce the technology by 2019 (compared to 85% of businesses across various industries).

Most of the IoT devices used in healthcare are patient monitors. Taking into account the fact that 89% of healthcare organizations have suffered from IoT related security breach, it forebodes huge privacy issues.

Greater Security Concerns

About two years ago, Qualcomm declared fragmentation the enemy of IoT. Their vision of seamless interoperability rested upon a single, open, and secure framework. This makes perfects sense, as security issues tend to grow in numbers along with the system’s complexity. However, as we already know, their vision of a simple and transparent connection is hard to achieve.

Security is the greatest risk and the overall concern with IoT. The onslaught of ransomware in 2017 is but a canary in a coal mine. Standards and protocols of sharing and protecting data aren’t in place yet. Many IoT devices do not have the processing power or storage space required to host endpoint security software. Greater problems are yet to come, and we must face them with some ready-made solutions. There are several open source initiatives aimed at tackling the IoT vulnerabilities OWASP, M2M Labs MainSpring, Eclipse IoT Project to name a few. However, with security in IoT, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place .

Cloud Technology Will Catch Up

Although cloud technology has been around for some time, it is yet to reach its full potential. Cloud solutions will be in higher demand in 2018 since software as a service (SaaS) has opened lucrative opportunities for businesses and individuals.

Infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS) have increased the number of cloud solutions available. The Cisco survey predicts that SaaS will take 60% of all cloud-based workloads, which is a 12% increase compared to 2017 forecasts.

So far, these predictions circa 2016 proved to be accurate. It goes without saying, that the storage capacities will also grow. The survey estimates the overall capacity available in 2018 to be 1.1 ZB, which is twice the size of that in 2017.

Cloud technology will advance virtual computing and reduce costs of operating business. However, these benefits come with security risks. Therefore, more and more companies in the open source sector (OpenStack, Project Things (by Mozilla), ownCloud) focus on data security in 2018.