IoT Adoption And Its Impact On Manufacturing

By Cheryl Knight, contributing writer

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings into play advanced options between device, system, and service that go beyond mere machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. This connectivity between devices and the Internet is expected to usher in a new age of automation in a wide variety of fields, including manufacturing, in addition to making applications like the Smart Grid possible.

“The enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity, and structure of Internet of Things data, creates challenges, particularly in the areas of security, data, storage management, servers, and the data center network,” said Joe Skorupa, VP and analyst at Gartner, as quotes in a recent Business Solutions article.

According to an LNS Research blog, however, the high cost of the new generation of IoT sensors and devices has thus far prohibited growth in this sector. Instead, the market sees a mixture of devices, including older, lower-cost devices and newer industry devices that cost more than their predecessors. Some of these older devices have also proven simpler to use when it comes to connectivity. Only when sensors and devices that offer IoT functionality at a comparable cost come onto the market will many companies adopt the new technology wholeheartedly.

The development of new IoT apps can directly help the market, especially to boost ROI. The marketplace has anticipated for a while, however, that Big Data generated by IoT devices and sensors should positively impact performance in the manufacturing sector in many ways.  Harshad Khatri of Oracle even predicts leveraging Big Data for competitive advantage will become the “price of entry” for the industry.

An area of concern when it comes to IoT and the manufacturing sector is security. According to the white paper “Security In the Internet of Things,” by Wind River, the accelerated growth from closed networks to the public Internet has generated a need to protect the data exposed by a more-open enterprise IT network.