Heading for trillions of IoTs

What exactly is the Internet of Things (IoT)? There is still a lot of confusion about this term. To understand that, it is better to understand the other concepts first. The Internet is the global connection of computers and networks. The Internet of People (IoP) is people using devices like desktops, laptops, tabs and smartphones to connect to the Internet and use it.

One way to define an IoT device is something that is connected to the Internet, but does not need human operation and intervention to collect and transmit data. For example if you had an IoT device at a traffic signal, it could collect information related to traffic, pedestrians, pollution, climate etc and transmit it to a command centre where all this precious data would be collected and analyzed.

That’s not to say that you can’t interact with an IoT device. The best example is a smart home assistant like Alexa. You can ask it for whatever you want and it will reply. But it may collect data around the house, trigger operations based on motion sensors and give you alerts 24X7 without you directly getting involved.

What about your smartphone? When you are using it, it is part of the IoP. But when you are not using it, it is still connected to the Internet, looking for updates on its own and transmitting data related to things like usage and location. It could then be called a mobile IoT device.

The applications for IoT are endless and they can be used in each and every industry you can think of. They can be embedded with sensors, placed in any appliance, device or industrial process that you want. It’s like a data worker quietly collecting data 365X24X7 and it can be programmed to do active tasks too.

The number of IoTs crossed the number of people ages ago. With the way the Covid Era has pushed no touch technologies and the need for continuous data, we will touch hundreds of billions of IoT devices in this decade itself.

Right now we have billions of devices connected to millions of data centers. If that sounds like a lot, then think of one day having trillions of IoTs embedded in that system. The data revolution got so huge that it became a data explosion. Right now we are looking at a series of exponentially increasing data explosions.

Humans are going to become totally unable to handle this data and it is inevitable that they will be on auto pilot soon, namely Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Even the best data analytic tools will not be enough.

It will be AI which will drive them in a supersized cloud world.