How is IoT Driving Digital Transformation Across Industries?

Data has always been a crucial resource giving the insights to drive transformation and innovation. Over the course of time, data collection methods have improved tremendously allowing more complex and larger quantity of data to be captured. The Internet of things (IoT) turned out to be another evolution in the data world encouraging transformative opportunities for business.

"IoT is one of the technology hubs that is driving the fourth wheel of the industrial revolution. It involves machine to machine and man to machine communications developed on cloud computing and network gathering sensors," says Aniruddha Guha Sarkar, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Interra Information Technologies Inc . This gives a transparency in the operational visibility to perform effective decisions to enhance the quality and optimise time and investment.

According to a report by McKinsey, IoT's economic impact will increase to $11 trillion a year by 2025. In addition, IoT devices are projected to increase to 20-40 billion devices by 2020.

Nowadays, most of the organisations are wired with smart connected products. These connected products bring a whole technical gambit to the organisation to gain a huge competitive advantage. There will be a drastic difference in the productivity generated via these products and also helps to simplify a live operation and generate valuable insights. Say, for example, "imagine a sensor inside an offshore drilling rig. This sensor monitors the integrity of the gas turbine as well as regulates the pressure of the oil well 8,000 feet below the ocean surface. It constantly detects, transmits and checks for damage. This sensor generates data that might provide critical information to the offshore industry", adds Aniruddha . Another example would be, many engine manufacturers are using sensors to detect the performance of these engines in real-time and driving predictive maintenance decisions.

Before the Internet of Things, organisations ran their operations and took decisions only from warehouse data which took a lot of time to attain intelligence and converge to a meaningful insight. But with the help of the Internet of Things, connected devices can generate real-time data from different data types. These devices where data is collected can communicate with each other in an ecosystem.

But every coin has got two sides, currently, the business pursuing Internet of things are in the nascent stage. On the other hand, it is of prime importance for organisations to understand how powerful IoT will transform various business functions. The two major hindrances are security and identity issues. The technological leaders must give a thought on how their conventional approaches to cybersecurity, identity and access management works in an environment involving a large number of interconnected devices.  Apart from security and identity issues, the lack of compelling business cases is also a major impediment to IoT growth for the enterprise.  Albeit, business ideas and justifications exist in most of the organisations, they have not yet been articulated and contemplated. This makes a major hurdle for the enterprises, thereby struggling a place for IoT enabled landscape.

The unfolding of business operations coupled with IoT gives huge opportunities for leveraged growth. IoT provides a platform for enterprises to rethink business model and foster new ways to create, deliver and capture value. The opportunistic deployment of IoT in business enterprises have the real potential to harness a strategic advantage.