IoT Adoption in India: How to Take It Forward?

By 2020, 34 billion devices will be connected to the Internet and IoT devices will account for 24 billion. It is expected to be one of the fastest growing segments in the Asia Pacific technology industry, with total Asia Pacific spending forecasted to be at US$9.96 Billion in 2014 and expected to reach US$57.96 Billion by 2020.

Organizations are realizing the huge potential of IoT to create smarter, more efficient workspaces, such as intelligent meeting rooms, location services, and real time monitoring. Therefore, many office spaces have seen an explosion of smart devices enter their daily working structure, which of course, raises challenges for the IT department who must be able to modify their security policies quickly and enforce underlying infrastructure changes on-demand, across multiple devices. Asia’s momentum also signifies that business operations are in 24/7 mode and any outage will bring about financial and reputation damages.

How can organizations better create policies to adapt to BYOD growth and the emerging challenges surrounding IoT adoption? We spoke to Santanu Ghose, Director, HP Enterprise to understand how organizations can better gain visibility and predict network issues to prevent outages ensuring always-on connectivity.

Industrial IoT

The Industrial Internet of Things will transform companies and countries, opening up a new era of economic growth and competitiveness. We see a future where the intersection of people, data and intelligent machines will have far-reaching impacts on the productivity, efficiency and operations of industries around the world. “To realize the full potential of the Industrial Internet, businesses and governments will need to overcome a number of important hurdles. Chief among them are security and data privacy, which are already rising in importance given increased vulnerabilities to attacks, espionage and data breaches driven by increased connectivity and data sharing,” said Santanu Ghose, Director, HP Enterprise.

Until recently, cybersecurity was focused on a limited number of end points but with the advent of the Industrial Internet, these measures will no longer be adequate as the physical and virtual worlds come together at a large scale. Organizations will need new security frameworks that span the entire cyber physical stack, from device-level authentication and application security, to system-wide assurance, resiliency and incidence response models.

BYOD & BYAL

After BYOD (Bring your own devices) we have BYAL (Bring your all things). While BYOD was limited to laptops, BYAL ensures that workforce and all of their devices are connected to the company network to ensure always on creativity.

Interoperability

Another crucial barrier is the lack of interoperability among existing systems, which will increase complexity and cost in Industrial Internet deployments. In the current scenario today’s operational technology systems work largely in silos.

However, in the future, a fully functional digital ecosystem will require seamless data sharing between machines and other physical systems from different manufacturers. The drive towards seamless interoperability will be further complicated by the long life span of typical industrial equipment, which would require costly retrofitting or replacement to work with the latest technologies.

Banks

According to TCS, financial institutions have reported an average IoT budget of $117.4 million which is 0.4 per cent of the revenue. Their study reveals that they are planning to spend $153.5 million by 2018. A large amount of their IoT budget (32 per cent in 2015 and 29 per cent by 2020) will account for monitoring financial products and services. Also, this year they plan to allocate 30 per cent of their IoT budget to monitor customers. This allocation is expected to increase to 34 per cent by 2020.

Most importantly, it has been observed that banks will rely on IoT technologies to monitor customers. To understand and engage with customers, 65 per cent of the banking respondents are using mobile apps and 16 per cent to track wearables. The next common IoT application is monitoring the supply chain with 38 per cent of the respondents using it to keep tabs on a complex web comprising branches, ATMs, partners and so on.

Smart City

Smart city runs on smart network and India has a lot to achieve in this sector.

Digital disruptions including social media, mobility, Machine-to-Machine (M2M), Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Cloud Computing are the backbone of next generation smart cities. The foremost technical roadblock for Smart City development in India is absence of standards and frameworks that allow interoperability among devices and layers at every interface in the smart city network.

Santanu Ghose, Director, HP Enterprise strongly believes that India needs smart planning and governance before foraying into smart city plan. Also, we need to develop a protocol to bring multiple groups together to establish a common language for Smart cities.

Retail

By using in-store sensors and video feeds, retailers can analyze and understand customer hot spots and flow patterns to improve store layouts and promotional placements. This will result in a better shopping experience and higher revenues.

Be it better inventory and supply chain visibility or optimizing store operations, retailers must ­come up with a compelling business case. To reap the benefi­ts of IoT faster, retailers must reduce the cost of implementing IoT. To make IoT cost effective, retailers must leverage existing devices in stores and warehouses such as CCTV cameras, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, in addition to installing new IoT devices and sensors.