How to Build a Business-Ready Internet of Things: Standardization
This is Office Three of PCMag'due south tendency overview, breaking down the enterprise IoT landscape through the lens of this year's Mobile World Congress. Cheque out Role Ane on enterprise utilize cases here and Part Ii on IoT security hither.
The Internet of Things (IoT) was i of the tiptop-billed themes at Mobile World Congress this twelvemonth, merely the enterprise side of the space was one of the quieter, more than interwoven trends revealed at the show. The shiny consumer IoT devices—smart home, wearables, connected cars, beautiful little robots—they were the IoT forepart men, lining the sensory-overloaded aisles of the Fira Gran Via in Barcelona. But if you walked past an enterprise tech behemothic on the show flooring, the odds were practiced yous'd pass a wall-sized poster or infographic about Intel, SAP, VMware, or HP Enterprise'south "IoT deject" or "IoT services solution." In fact, the odds were good you lot'd hear near any product capitalizing on the dorsum-end cloud, infrastructure, security, and ecosystem-full of related services sprouting upwardly around the new ecosystem of business and consumer devices.
There are three large boxes to check off if you're going to telephone call your company'south IoT solution enterprise-gear up: security, interoperability, and a practiced plenty value proposition. The tech you deploy should feed you back information and analytics, or be able to produce a tangible business advantage that actually makes a deviation to your lesser line.
Role One of this feature broke down some of the biggest IoT applications we're seeing in business tech right now. Part Two delved into how companies are working to solve all of the dissimilar levels of the IoT security equation. The final piece of the story digs into some of well-nigh prominent IoT standardization efforts available, and how blockchain (some other space we've been watching closely lately) might be the answer to some of the toughest IoT execution riddles: interoperability, identity, authentication, and security, all wrapped up in a distributed, immutable ledger.
The Interoperability Factor
The concept of interoperability is key to 1 of the biggest selling points for the IoT: millions of connected devices talking to i another. To pull off that kind of seamless interoperability between machines, manufacturers demand to sync up hardware and software across industries and on a massive scale. That'south where standardization comes in.
In enterprise-focused IoT, interoperability frequently means machine-to-car (M2M) communication. On this cease of IoT standardization, you've got players such as the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the oneM2M specification. There are also newer initiatives involved, including the Open up Trust Protocol (OTrP) developed by ARM, Intercede, Solacia, and Symantec.
At Mobile World Congress, I talked to Intercede CEO Richard Parris about the OTrP. I besides spoke with Chris Drake, Main Technology Officer at iconectiv (a oneM2M member company and subsidiary of Ericsson), about information technology. The executives discussed the challenges of interoperability and IoT standardization, and how to manage M2M data access and sharing.
"In IoT, at that place are software applications within these devices that talk to the deject over complicated network configurations," said iconectiv's Drake. "Nosotros espouse that these connections should be governed by a highly interoperable framework. Right now, the race to win the mindshare of IoT and deploy sensors is a very bespoke, point-to-point procedure. The sensors talk to this cloud application merely won't talk to another and won't share information between them."
Making Sense of IoT Standards
The IoT is still in its early stages of evolution. At the moment, the standards mural is fragmented and tin exist a scrap confusing. Hither's a quick breakdown of some of the more prominent standardization efforts out there.
In contempo news, two of the biggest open-source, tech industry consortiums—the AllSeen Alliance and Qualcomm's open up-source Alljoyn framework—joined forces with the Intel-backed Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) under the new Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF). The OCF is managed past The Linux Foundation, which and so partnered with Thread (backed by Google's Nest). The OCF's Board of Directors includes executives from Catechism, Cisco, GE, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Samsung. Dislocated yet? That's simply 1 commonage standards effort.
Nonprofit standards organizations such as the IEEE and W3C have their ain IoT standards. Apple has HomeKit. And IFTTT and Zapier are tools designed to connect internet-connected apps, services, and devices. At that place's even a whole other category of standards for IoT networking communications protocols. Then, in addition to all of those, yous've got enterprise IoT standards designed for industrial calibration.
Time for a brief tech history lesson. Telcordia Technologies, which has done concern under the iconectiv brand since 2022, has roots that go all the way back to the 1984 antitrust accommodate that bankrupt up the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) monopoly for practiced. One of the resulting entities—along with what is today Alcatel Clear-cut, AT&T, Verizon, and dozens of other companies—was Bell Communications Enquiry, Inc. or Bellcore. The visitor was renamed Telcordia Technologies in 1999 and caused past Ericsson in 2022. All these years after, iconectiv is Bellcore, just by a different proper noun. In that location's your fun fact for the story.
All of that history was given to provide some context into iconectiv's background in the current IoT landscape. The company has evolved from its roots in telecommunications and carrier interoperability to mobile fraud detection and identity management for enterprises (and now into IoT interoperability). It's from that perspective that Drake described how iconectiv handles IoT security and how oneM2M works to enable enterprise-grade interoperability.
"The oneM2M architecture fosters interoperability at the awarding layer," said Drake. "Information technology'south non a connection layer thing where, later you secure the connection, the application tin still run amok. Security at the connection level is non the respond."
"Permit's dive into what a standard service layer looks like for IoT," Drake continued. "At the device level, you need to secure the connections. Above that, you lot want to secure the awarding layer, and do and so through middleware that understands ingestion of the dataset from the device and knows where it'southward going. Interoperability ways a scalable management scheme for securing the privacy of that data as it flows to multiple cloud apps, not only one. Our directory manages authentication and identification of those streams."
The oneM2M standard currently has 230 fellow member companies, including big names such as Amazon, Cisco, Huawei, Intel, NEC, Qualcomm, Samsung, and many others. The organization is currently at work on releasing three of its specification frameworks, designed to enable IoT interoperability by working with legacy and proprietary technology across industries through a "service layer" that connects embedded hardware and M2M apps.
"OneM2M facilitates interoperability through a routing framework for industrial and field-level data," explained Drake. "The framework understands the places the data can and tin't get, and can talk to neighboring middleware in another network depending on where the IoT device is located."
Another contempo standardization effort in enterprise IoT is the Open Trust Protocol. Developed by scrap maker ARM, Korean tech company Solacia, and cybersecurity company Intercede, this newer IoT standard was announced in 2022. It combines secure architecture with "trusted" code direction tools to overcome the difficulties of IoT interoperability in a fragmented IoT device landscape. Intercede CEO Richard Parris explained the protocol in the context of one of the most well-known classes of IoT devices: connected cars.
"A automobile is a swell microcosm of the same IoT trouble you see across medical devices, smart homes or airplanes, or what take you. When a Mercedes S Class leaves the factory, it probably has 150 ECUs [engineering control units] built into the vehicle, and they all need to trust each other," said Parris. "That motorcar is also going to go through maintenance cycles. Components will be swapped out. Firmware will be upgraded at dissimilar times. The car will go through multiple owners. Safety and security over time in a connected device like that is a huge, vastly complicated trouble. Maintaining digital trust and identity in those components over 15 years of a smart auto and doing that in a sensible way."
The OTrP's objective is to create an open protocol that defines how devices trust each other in a connected environment. Essentially, the protocol ensures that identity information is never exposed between apps, and provides a flexible standard by which you can connect firmware and apps through scalable public key infrastructure (PKI) without locking into specific vendors (to reduce fragmentation).
Intercede works with enterprises, governments, service providers, and app developers across industries. While the various standardization efforts beyond the IoT and M2M landscapes are vital for long-term enterprise viability, there are as well—as nosotros've now shown—a metric ton of them. Ultimately, Parris said regime regulation may accept to come into play too, peculiarly in the wake of catastrophic IoT-based attacks such every bit the Mirai botnet DDoS.
"Another dimension nosotros've seen is the potential weaponization of devices in the home and machine, which means we're going to start to see the ecosystems become regime-regulated," said Parris. "But government regulation of all this technology will just exist effective if you lot can get down to the crypto forcefulness in the silicon, eliminate the use of passwords to protect things, accept cloud-based certificates at volume securely injected into things, and and then have an ecosystem in which you lot manage the lifecycle of ownership and the keys of acquaintance ownership."
That'southward what all these standards aim to practise.
How Blockchain and the IoT Fit Together
The IoT industry is beset by large questions. Security, interoperability, identity direction, and the like are formidable challenges to be overcome earlier the promise of the IoT will ever be fully embraced by the business world. On a number of these fronts, blockchain may serve every bit a possible solution.
Blockchain's applicability in IoT management isn't a one-off experimental use case. Several of the companies I spoke to for this characteristic—Accenture, Aricent, iconectiv, and others—discussed why blockchain's distributed ledger makes sense for the IoT. They also explained the engineering's potential to solve for the complex identity management and authentication problems that the IoT presents.
Intercede's Parris discussed the challenge of enforcing IoT policies in continued cars as the device changes owners. Craig McNeil, Global Managing Director for IoT at Accenture, mentioned how blockchain-based smart contracts could track IoT device ownership and information rights in exactly that type of environment.
"Think nearly an automaker today: Who has access to all the information coming from a connected car? Fifty-fifty tires have sensors in them," said McNiel. "So I purchase a car with all these sensors then think I ain the information my machine is collecting. Simply let'due south say the manufacturer likewise thinks information technology's their information. A distributed digital ledger could rail of IoT ownership of that motorcar, and automatically-executed smart contracts [could] handle the ownership rights."
That'southward one simplified application of blockchain in the IoT. Global design and engineering business firm Aricent is working to build blockchain solutions into its evolution process for enterprise clients, blistering information technology into the mechanisms for managing IoT security and identity inside a company's existing infrastructure.
Aricent is working primarily with private blockchain distributions (the visitor has cloud partnerships with IBM and others) to develop distributed IoT software that keeps the chain of trust intact. That idea of trusted information connections is core to the IoT, as experts take explained throughout this story. Prakasha Ramchandra, Executive Vice Presidet of Technology and Innovation at Aricent, walked us through the firm'southward thinking on blockchain and IoT.
"We are talking almost the chain of trust to constitute product evolution across hardware and software. Federated identity is function of IoT device identification," said Ramchandra. "Blockchain is a fabric to tie all that together. There are unique challenges to solve at every level of IoT compared to traditional enterprise, and blockchain can exist useful in validating and authenticating inside the IoT environment, the network, the application layer. There are use cases from devices up to data security, and we're trying to evolve that in terms of how it all gels."
Aricent isn't at the signal where they can stitch a distributed blockchain ledger throughout the unabridged finish-to-end IoT development ecosystem. Blockchain, every bit a technology, is still in its early stages and blockchain in the IoT is even more than novel. The company is starting small, by establishing blockchain-based identity verification to tie IoT device, network, and app security together. Aricent CTO Walid Negm expanded on the DevOps angle.
"Nosotros're using blockchain to establish this chain of trust for source code. Checking on test code, using individual keys to sign, making certain nobody tampers with it, and working on applying the blockchain ledger to that in a transparent and frictionless fashion," said Negm. "We're trying to brand information technology as piece of cake every bit possible for the IoT developer. The thought is to overlay blockchain onto a DevOps environment to help streamline product development. Then, every time a developer commits code, it's automatically tested and validated by other nodes in the system."
Aricent takes a code-level view only there are vast applications across that of how blockchain and the IoT fit together. Chain of Things is a remember tank exploring blockchain to solve for IoT security, identity, and interoperability. Filament is a blockchain startup edifice IoT hardware and software for industrial applications such as agriculture, manufacturing, and the oil and gas industries. IBM has a whole Watson IoT platform built on blockchain. The list goes on and on.
A global IoT isn't an easy concept to wrap your head around. Building an IoT that can stand up up to the needs of enterprises is even more than hard to grasp when y'all factor in security, identity, interoperability, and engineering science such as blockchain thrown into the mix. But, when you put all of that together into a network of devices and data streams completely redefining the manner y'all do business, information technology'south easy to see the appeal. Most enterprise companies aren't large fans of the "IoT" every bit the name for this new category of connective engineering science. Merely, at this bespeak, they're stuck with information technology.
About Rob Marvin
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