Sizing up the opportunity: Internet of Things set to grow rapidly in 2018

By Warren Miller, contributing writer

Has the Internet of Things, or IoT, reached a critical mass? Not according to a study jointly conducted by security and network hardware company Cradlepoint and IT services company Spiceworks. The findings predict that the IoT will continue to experience rapid growth not only into 2018 but for the foreseeable future. A survey of 400 IT professionals revealed that more than 30% of companies/organizations currently utilize IoT-related systems, with many more planning to do so in the next calendar year.

IoT implementations are most commonly found in the IT services and retail/wholesale industries, according to the survey, but fields like education and health care aren’t far behind. Of the companies that have already made investments in IoT, 77% employ IoT security services, while 71% utilize building-security components. Fifty-one percent of respondents to the survey believe that cloud-based hosting technologies will be the IoT-related priority for their employers in 2018, while 47% cited security as the principal dimension that they believe their companies will invest in.

Among the respondents who were less enthused about the future of IoT, security was a major concern, as were the possible return on investing in IoT and the reliability of IoT systems. Perhaps in response to concerns about security, approximately 40% of respondents say that they are or will be using separate networks for IoT implementation, although that number was exceeded by the number of respondents planning on configuring IoT into their existing networks.

The Internet of Things will not only continue to grow rapidly in the coming year but also in the future. Image source: Pixabay.

The incorporation of IoT into corporate settings is definitely being pushed by the tech-savvy side of business, with 71% of IoT adoption being championed by IT managers/directors. Perhaps not surprisingly, business managers are much less likely to come down in favor of more IoT proliferation. To ease the bean counters’ concerns, Cradlepoint made three suggestions as to how to best weave IoT into office settings: to treat network security as a foundational consideration, to bring in experts from outside the company to optimize IoT implementation, and to carefully consider whether their existing network infrastructures can handle the addition of IoT.

So it seems that the obvious benefits of the IoT, like dramatic improvements in services that use big data and new intelligent algorithms to better predict and control just about everything from traffic lights to pacemakers, will continue to drive IoT deployment. Products for the smart home, smart buildings, and smart factories will also continue to expand and evolve. We can even hope for entire smart cities wherein transportation, communications, and energy use are all optimized and managed to drastically improve convenience and efficiency.

What’s more difficult to predict is how an immersive IoT will surprise us with completely new products and services for things we can’t even imagine. This also means that there will be issue that grows out of an expanding IoT ecosystem that we can’t imagine either. What we can be sure of, however, is how important security will be as the IoT grows in new and fantastic ways. After all, we don’t want our smart cities or medical devices hacked any more than our bank accounts, right?