Internet of Things Predictions for 2018 and Beyond

CIOs and business stakeholders across all markets are designing and deploying IoT products and services to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world in order to create new growth opportunities for their businesses. In 2014, Accenture reported that 87% of consumers had never heard of this technology. In 2016, the Internet of Things Institute survey reported that 19% of government and business professionals had never heard of this technology and only 18% were slightly conversant with it.

Recent trends in IoT

A lot of research that has been done over the last few years depicts IoT as a significant industry-changing technology. According to CRN research in 2017, 85% of solution providers reported that they are currently providing revenue from IoT solutions and 49% reported that Internet of Things is a great opportunity for them in the next 18 months. Simultaneously, Gartner reported that 8.4 billion connected devices are in use in 2017, with an yield of 31% from 2016. According to Gartner internet of things predictions, consumers are using 63% of IoT applications and business spendings depict 57% of total IoT spendings in 2017. Have a look at the tables below for further information that shows IoT predictions category wise and year wise.

This year saw a huge development in IoT technology. So, 2018 might be hopefully worthwhile for IoT. A few IoT predictions for 2018 and beyond are listed below.

More cities will become smart

Consumers and businesses won’t be the only ones using internet of things devices. Cities will also start adopting this technology to become more powerful and save money and time. It means that cities will have power to remotely manage, automate and gather data from bike rental stations, video camera surveillance systems, visitor kiosks, and automobiles.

Implementation of IoT services will increase

IoT has been already implemented in the healthcare industry and 2018 is expected to see an increased usage of IoT services in it. Not only healthcare, several other industries who are already using this technology could enhance their implementations. Businesses who have been regularly using other technologies like Charles Phillips-led enterprise software developer Infor are planning to include IoT services instead. IoT Analytics predicted that IoT platforms will grow at a CAGR of 33% between 2015 and 2021. The major difficulty with increased implementation of IoT services in different industries is security.

Fig: Overall IoT platform market 2015-2021

Developments in IoT security

This year we saw a couple of developments in IoT security. Hewlett-Packard launched HPE SecureData, a solution for IoT and Hadoop security in February. After that, Intel launched Intel Secure Device Onboard, a solution for IoT security. A sign from Intel’s SDO (secure device onboard) shows that in the next year, we may see a new solution for integration of services including blockchain i.e SDO’s blockchain. It is already proved that blockchain can do all the good for IoT like low maintenance cost and decentralization. In 2018, we might see a complete and strong use of blockchain for IoT security.

IDC predicted that “by 2019, more than 75% of IoT device manufacturers will improve their security and privacy capabilities, making them more trustworthy partners for technology buyers.”

More IoT platform offerings that fit buyers’ needs

Product designers are looking for platforms to build IoT into their products. Microsoft Azure IoT Suite, General Electric (GE) Predix, and AWS are some of the platforms that are currently available. But only a few of them can help to fulfil their requirements. In the next year, we can expect more platforms that satisfy all the buyers needs pertaining to either deploying connected products or designing new connected products.

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence will gain more importance

As there will be more and more smart devices across the globe, the volume of processed data will be more. So, Big Data is required to deal with such large data sets to analyse and process the data correctly. Integrating IoT devices with artificial intelligence has already gained importance this year and will certainly grow bigger in 2018. AI evaluates data based on predictive thinking and runs real-time tasks without the need of hand coding in IoT channels. So, Internet of Things along with AI will go smart and capture the information obtained out of our routine habits and execute manual tasks for us.

• IoT - Collects the data

• Big Data - Captures, stores, analyses and process the data

• AI - Computes data based on predictive thinking

Summing up, IoT has huge potential and can be used in any industry. Some companies increased their focus on IoT research and are planning to implement more IoT devices and some are finding solutions for security issues. It’s not like only the number of IoT devices will increase, but IoT services and the ways to validate data as well. “Gartner top strategic predictions for 2018 and beyond” stated that IoT technology will be present in almost 95 percent of electronic products by 2020.