IoT Challenges: What are The Greatest and How to Deal With?

In this world of hyper-connection, Internet of Things (IoT) has, by any means, become a friend of both individuals and organisations. Thanks to the diverse advancements in wireless technology, IoT has been gradually redefining not only the way we work but also the way we live. Smart cities, smart homes, wearables, smart alarm systems, etc were then born to ease and to rouse our boring, complicated human-lives. But what exactly makes IoT such a wonder these days? Maybe 7 categories below could give you a clear explanation for IoT major challenges.

• Read more: Potential Use of IoT Applications in Traffic, Healthcare and Agriculture

1. The Capability to Keep Up With the Velocity of Data

One of IoT’s most outstanding trait is its ability to keep data moving in real time. Under the control of IoT, data is continuously transferred from one device to another and end up at your mobile phone, your laptop or your PC – whichever plays the role of a control system. Data collected will, therefore, be analysed so that users could extract useful and valuable information needed for their specific purposes.
Hence, IoT can be seen as a streaming solution. Thanks to IoT, users will constantly be given a heads up on devices’ status, the working state and the process. Any change in data patterns will be identified in no time, therefore, notify users with critical issues. Once the problems are pointed out, users can act on the necessities before anything worse happens.

However, a big challenge facing IoT is that it may be difficult for the traditional approaches to data to keep up with the speed of data created by IoT devices because they need to be processed instantly.
Let’s take REALM, a product designed by Savvycom engineer team. It is a smart GPS tracker using IoT technology that allows users to form a group tracking among drivers heading to the same destination and maintain communication with each other in real time.
Thanks to the ability to connect and notify each person’s location in real time, REALM is able to create a virtual fence which will immediately alert the group leader if there is any member goes out of track. Its velocity of data has indeed helped users to optimise the time spending for finding the right direction and guarantee that every member shows up at the same time without anyone being lost behind.

2. A Massive Amount of Data

IoT is distinct for pulling everything into one single place. No matter it’s image, video, audio, vibration, temperature, humidity, pressure or anything, as long as it is counted as data, IoT can connect them all.

According to market research of International Data Corporation (IDC), it is estimated that the data created by IoT devices will exceed 40,000 exabytes by 2020. This makes IoT a giant data storage, which can not only manage but also analyse and process such information as per user requirements. Thus, users can pinch information from this massive library and make use of it.
A good example of this functionality is smartwatches. Let’s take Apple Watch as a more specific case. By collecting one’s personal data, an Apple Watch can measure the heart rate, count the walking steps, update the daily weather, elaborate and convert them into notifications, such as alerting when one’s sitting too long or reminding one to drink an adequate amount of water. 

3. IoT Sensors Challenges

In the IoT network, one device is appointed as the “server”, the heart and brain that control all connected devices around. It takes charge of gathering and managing every data and information other devices emit to IoT, analysing and representing it to users.
In case there is any following action required, the server will send orders back to those devices wirelessly. Therefore, the locations become less of importance: IoT could easily control all of them with just one single device at a single place.

Various options can be proposed as an IoT server, such as smartphones, laptops, PCs, or smartwatches. However, smartphones are the most popular choice because of their portability, prevalence and universality function.
By downloading the IoT controller app to smartphones, users will be able to keep track of the working state of devices and identify critical issues beforehand, which will help users avoid lots of negative scenarios in the future.

4. Immaturity of IoT standards

In order to collect data and transmit the analysed information and users’ orders back to the devices, wireless communication is an indispensable companion to IoT. Therefore, the more developed wireless technology is, the more efficient IoT systems become.
Nowadays, wireless technology has advanced to quite an extent. There are many ways that data sensors can communicate to a central point: Bluetooth, Bluetooth low energy, Wi-Fi, Internet USB, 2G, 3G, 4G or even 5G.
Furthermore, various wireless communication can be used at the same time to maximise the efficiency of data delivery, as long as they are well managed. It may be Blue Tooth Low Energy (BTLE) that is used at the edge to connect multiple devices to an interim ‘aggregator’, and only after then that Wi-Fi is used to send data onto the central systems.
With the help of such advanced wireless communications, the standards of IoT go higher and higher as days pass, promising an era of automation and absolute convenience ahead.

5. IoT Cloud Challenges

As mentioned in the second category, IoT can not only collect and analyse data but also store and manage those data for further use as well as other revisions in the future. The reason why IoT is capable of saving and dealing with such a giant amount of data is that its core system is located in Cloud.

With Cloud, any change of resource needed for application will no longer be a barrier. Cloud ensures the connection among devices and that every information is stored automatically and constantly updated. The processing requirements to model, predict, simulate and visualise the stored history can all be managed from a single point as well.
Cloud can also eliminate integration’s need and prevent data’s overloading, which helps devices run more smoothly.

6, Integration Challenges Facing IoT

IoT solutions often need much more than just sensor-based data to become useful. Reports from engineers held in content management systems, ERP (scheduling), and Asset management systems within the enterprise may also need to be brought in.
However, the more components there are in the system, the more complex and confused it would be for users. Therefore, integration across all system factors is needed so that the whole process won’t be messed up:
“Integration helps capture data from smart devices and move it into business applications to automate processes, support real-time monitoring and apply analytics for insights.” – Perficient guide, The Why, What and How of IoT: 50+ examples across 11 industries

7. Security & Privacy

Because IoT can connect with a variety of devices, each of which is distributed different geolocations and run by different principles and standards, maintaining a consistent level of security across the whole system becomes critically hard. Therefore, IoT’s firewall is not really strong and later results in information breaches as well as outsiders’ illegal infiltration.

Moreover, IoT is often the target of cyber-attacks for many reasons apart from the crack in security, such as IoT’s ability to multiply the number of botnets. By hacking one single IoT, attackers can manipulate all the data stored within the IoT platform. And IoT, as it functions, will automatically send the infected code to other devices, putting users’ private information in danger.