Understanding The Verticals Part 7: IoT Infrastructure – foundational building blocks
As Charlie goes through his daily-connected lifestyle journey in our previous posts, in the background, he was always seamlessly traversing between smart city verticals and the IoT infra vertical (a.k.a. foundational building blocks). The building blocks are the core enablers required for smart city initiatives.
The IoT Infra vertical basically aligns with the IoT stack and the diagram below shows the relationship between the IoT Infra vertical and the IoT stack.
IoT Infra Vertical – the engine for smart city initiatives
Noting that a smart city is an ecosystem of interconnected systems; there must be a set of commonality, foundational building blocks that effortlessly facilitate the seamless interactions within and between the solution verticals.
For a successful smart city transformation, the sensors and smart devices must communicate (bi-directional connectivity) the immerse amount of data (cloud) from connected systems (interoperability) to enable decision making for next best action (analytics) with a secured (security) access to up-to-date and valued-added information (data) and services to its citizens.
In addition, the realization of these IoT Infra building blocks will result in a vertical and horizontal scalable, available, reliable, maintainable and stable IoT solutions and services. Let’s unpack each of the building blocks.
Connectivity
Connectivity provides the connectedness capability through various communication networks.
The network technology enables the sensors, smart devices, systems, and people to interact, thus creating connectivity to each other to facilitate data collection and communication of decisions and actions. The network fabric and elements (e.g., devices, sensors, gateways, protocol converters, routers, switches, etc.) make the horizontal and vertical connectivity possible.
The estimated IoT communication protocol market size is expected to grow from USD 11.44 billion in 2016 to USD 15.80 billion by 2022.
Interoperability
The McKinsey & Company estimated that of the total potential economic value attributed to IoT, interoperability between IoT systems is required 40% on average.
The purpose of interoperability is integration; where systems are connected vertically and horizontally across solution verticals. This allows for leveraging of commonalities such as seamless data flow, notification, messaging, APIs, API management layer, etc.
Today, most vendors focus on integration of systems within a solution vertical based on their proprietary technology. The vertical interoperability is where successes are common. However, horizontal interoperability is more challenging and one of the reasons for this is the lack of standards across vendor, make, model, version, manufacturer and industry.
The global IoT middleware market is expected to grow from USD 3.86 billion in 2015 to USD 11.58 billion by 2020.
Data
The expectation from any IoT initiative is the generation of large volume of and diverse data. The massive data needs to be collected, stored, processed, and classified into groups for insights.
However, the structuring of data storage capacity and management are issues that need to be addressed; especially, as data repository move towards the edge of the network.
Open and secured access to IoT data (public, private, business, and government), privacy and data ownership requirements are another set challenges that the IoT Infra data foundational building block will address.
The data lakes market is expected to grow from USD 2.53 billion in 2016 to USD 8.81 billion by 2021. In addition, IDC predicts that by 2019 50% of smart city open data projects will evolve both monetized and free data services.
Cloud
With the ever-growing number of IoT sensors and smart devices generating volumes of data, there is the on-going need to increase the on-premises storage capacity. This demand is expensive and takes longer to implement and deploy. As a result, cloud (i.e., leveraging the economy of scale) becomes an attractive option for the massive data storage required for smart city solutions. It also allows for the ability to ramp up or scale down capacity on as needed basis.
The challenge of combined storage capacity, network and computing, complex data analysis, scalability, and open data access for IoT projects dictate the need for cloud computing technology.
The cloud storage market is expected to grow from USD 23.76 billion to USD 74.94 billion by 2021.
Security
The magnitude of connected assets and devices for IoT solutions and multiple solution verticals associated with smart city presents a vast footprint for ease of Security Bridge – nightmare for IT. As a result, “don’t connect without IoT security in place and operational.”
The objective is to have security within a solution vertically and horizontally across solution verticals, noting that security must be supported “up and down” the IoT stack.
The security building block of the IoT Infra vertical must therefore support the ability to address security capabilities such as secured device layer (e.g., secure booting), secured connectivity (encryption, authentication, time-stamps, caching, etc.), secured and trusted cloud (cloud infra and apps), identity and access management (I&AM), security information and event management (SIEM), cyber threat management, data protection and privacy, security management, and security governance.
The IoT security market is expected to grow from USD 7.90 billion in 2016 to USD 36.95 billion by 2021.
Analytics
The success and benefits from IoT cannot be realized without analytics. By 2030, 500 billion devices and objects will be connected to the Internet. The task then is how to gain insights from the massive data for timely decision-making and next best action?
With analytics the following challenges are addressed for successful insights, decision-making, and actions:
The ability to identify relationships between data collected at specific time intervals.
The ability to combine multiple data formats (e.g., text, image, audio, etc.) associated with an occurrence.
The ability to process a cross sectional data view for machine learning.
The IoT analytics market is estimated to grow from USD 4.85 billion in 2016 to USD 22.65 billion by 2021.
The unpacking of the IoT infra vertical concludes the Understanding the smart city IoT Verticals series.
With varying definitions of what IoT and smart city are, it’s not always easy to pinpoint what a smart city initiative should encompass. Further, successes of smart city projects are not assured when critical components of the smart city ecosystem are omitted in the smart city solutions. We hope that this series gave you a deeper understanding of what a smart city ecosystem for vertical and horizontal solutions is. What series would you like to see next? Is there anything you think we missed? Let me know on Twitter.