And here is IoT
Each development company has a period in its life cycle, when it comes to the understanding that the future is here. And we need to urgently determine whether you are already in the future, you are hopelessly behind, or you can still catch up with him and integrate into it. We have been dealing with network monitoring and IT infrastructure management systems for many years. Well, that is, ITIL, SAM, ITSM is our everything. Recently, at conferences, seminars and congresses, we are increasingly confronted with the concept of IoT (Internet of Things). We are interested in what awaits our company in the context of these processes, how IoT influences business in general and how to continue to live. We studied the problem, answered our own questions and today are ready to share our reasoning with you. Everything turned out not so visionary and fantastic as we had supposed. The prose of life, the prose of technology, and a little panic.
At the consumer electronics exhibition CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2016, projects and prototypes associated with IoT, said more than 900 companies from 3800 participants. This is an obvious trend - more and more companies, especially mobile and gadget, are seeking to acquire information about the consumer, to know more about it than he does. This is all in order to develop relationships, offer new relevant services and loyalty programs, and in other words, sell and make profits.
As always, Gartner knows most about the Internet of things. They predict that by the end of 2016, 6.4 billion of Internet-connected things will be used around the world, which is 30% more than in 2015. That is, 5.5 million new things will be connected every day. According to the same forecast, by 2020 the number of devices connected to the Internet will be 20.8 billion. These figures include not only consumer electronics, but also industrial devices.
')
It seems quite obvious. And if so, then where does the Alloy Software team and its experiences about the world of the Internet of things? In fact, not everything is so simple, we are very much so, and the Internet of things is not at all what is popular among the masses. This is not kitsch and not mass culture, this is science, these are technologies and new realities of IT infrastructure.
The research and analytical company already mentioned by us in its report treats IoT (Internet of Things) as a set of physical objects connected by a network and able to measure the parameters of their own state, the state of the environment and transmit the measurements. That is, these are various sensors, instruments, industrial measuring instruments, etc. Based on the logic of Gartner, things are not necessarily connected to the Internet, they can interact with each other and with the control center using M2M protocols (machine-to-machine - machine-to-machine interaction, in which machines exchange information with each other).
- With us power!
- With us, the Internet of things!
Intel is focusing on the consumer sector today (and it will not lose!). For him, one of the priorities is the development of the Internet of things suitable for the household: motion sensors, temperature, smart home systems, and so on. Plus, the company has a traditional interest in using IoT in the scientific and research fields.
At Cisco, the era of IoT is not the future, but our recent past. Even in their report of April 2011, they firmly designated the transition zone in the IoT era. In the Cisco Business Solutions Group (CBSG) report, the Internet of Things is a form of Internet existence from the moment when the number of “things” connected to the world wide web has exceeded the population of the Earth. According to their version, IoT was born somewhere in 2008-2009.
Cisco, however, goes even deeper and examines the levels of existence of the Internet of things. As of 2011, company experts describe IoT as a collection of disparate networks and argue that the development of the Internet of things is in merging this tangle of networks with security and analytics.
At the same time, Cisco is urged not to mix and not identify the concepts of “Internet” and “web”. These terms are not interchangeable. Thus, the Internet, by definition, from a report is a physical layer or network consisting of switches, routers, and other equipment. Its main function is to transport information from one point to another quickly, reliably and safely. The web, on the other hand, is the application layer on top of the Internet. Its main role is to provide an interface that makes information from the Internet useful.
In 2016, you do not need to be an industry expert to declare that the forecast was correct - we are witnessing the era of big data analysis, and many companies put the security of the Internet of things at the forefront. Why this is important - let's talk a little lower. In the meantime, let us return to the Cisco report, from which it is difficult to break away, because, being a white paper, it is not written in the language of statistics, but very much alive and in places fun. For example, so.
Now more to the point. We at Alloy Software develop and sell two key products: Alloy Navigator for organizing the work of the IT service and Alloy Discovery for integrated accounting and control of the software and hardware of the enterprise. And we tried to answer: what is IoT for our business clients? At the present stage of development of the Internet of things, two narrow definitions of IoT can be distinguished.
In fact, while both options are extremely rare, but we already know that IoT gets to all areas of business. So, IoT found itself in the energy and water supply (smart meters, detection of losses and sabotage), in the oil and gas sector, in medicine, in the operation of road transport and so on.
Even by the number of thematic posts on Habré and Geektimes it can be judged that the development is increasingly turning towards IoT. According to the EDC report (Evans Data Corporation), in some regions of the globe, up to 62% of developers are involved in or are planning to develop applications related to IoT.
At the same time, when they are asked what challenges in the development and implementation of IoT devices, they encounter first of all, the developers answer:
But when developing for the Internet of things, they primarily focus on:
As you can see from the statistics, developers are concerned about just the key parameters of the Internet of things: aggregation and interpretation of data and security. Moreover, this security should be provided at all levels of information transfer, and at all stages of its passage from the source to the drive.
Cell operators and developers of CRM-ERP-BPM systems were among the first who faced the problem of ubiquitous access to the Internet, the growth of mobile services, social networks and the development of the IoT consumer segment. The first had to develop networks for high-speed access to the Internet, to increase capacity to maintain an enormous number of devices: tablets, smartphones, "simchaty" e-books, etc. The second ones were hit by endless demands to integrate almost with the soul of the client, namely with wearable electronics, social networks, instant messengers, and so on. By the way, in fact, the business here was notorious - the overwhelming majority were influenced by fashion, they didn’t use data before, and now they don’t know where to put gigabytes of customer data.
However, there are challenges for everyone who is developing software for corporate use. In the near future, more and more companies will strive to develop IoT and implement it in both directions: both for solving corporate-level tasks and for collecting data from customers for the purpose of product promotion.
Challenge 1. Techniques and technologies suitable for managing current IT assets may not be viable. New realities will require the development and implementation of new intelligent systems to support work with data and ensure security in IoT. And if now these are problems of availability of equipment and stable operation of data warehouses, then the tasks of ensuring ultra-security and data processing will soon come to the fore - information will be more expensive and more expensive, there will be many hunters, and their methods will be ahead of their time. For example, recently, hackers have been able to remotely gain access to a car control system.
Challenge 2. Already today, companies that work with a wide pool of clients should integrate IoT into the company's current and long-term strategies and relate opportunities and threats. The Internet of things will easily change the business models of many companies; you need to be prepared for this.
Challenge 3. Data collection, the ability to interpret them and form the basis of decision-making increases the company's flexibility, the complexity of analytics creates competitive advantages. But the data must be safely stored - any leakage is fraught with multimillion-dollar losses and reputational risks. By the way, some of the problems can always be solved with the help of software such as Alloy Software - for example, auditing computer software if it is equipped with Windows, Linux, Mac OS. Of course, not everything will turn out to be audited - for other network devices, some sort of state analysis is possible only with the support of the SNMP protocol by this device. In other cases, it is necessary to look for other solutions - and the development of such software is one of the main tasks of the future, because without monitoring and auditing the hardware and software of the IoT world, it will be difficult to deal with external and internal problems.
Call 4. Guaranteed points of vulnerability in IoT - for example, the moment of user interaction with the device. Here it is important to choose a secure and reliable authentication model. It is also worth keeping the data anonymously, in the link from the user, so you deliberately devalue the information for attackers. Of course, encryption during data transfer should also gradually reach a new level.
- Oh, this is a drone car from Google. I am not responsible for how he accelerates!
Call 5. Change testing model. The penetration of IoT into our lives greatly enhances the role of software testing. Moreover, engineers should be responsible for testing each level of information transfer, pay attention to security issues.
Challenge 6. Several levels of security management should be created - this way you can scale the project and, if during refactoring or in case of force majeure, you have to sacrifice one level of security, the rest will be preserved and ensure data integrity. It is also important to determine which device will be in control and direct efforts towards continuous monitoring of its condition.
- It is necessary to inform the boss that we have data leakage!
Challenge 7. Most unpleasant, because poorly controlled. If you use solutions of partners in your work, for example, high-tech start-ups, be prepared for the fact that they are not able to provide security in the IoT environment. Yes, today these guys are cleverly using the Internet of things, but security is a third thing for them, simply because they often don’t see their project in a year.
- Now all our devices are 100% safe.
- How did you do this?
- I turned them all off.
According to Gartner, over the past five years, global shipments of traditional PCs (desktops and laptops) have dropped from 343 million units in 2012 to about 232 million units in 2016. In terms of revenue, the global PC market has shrunk from $ 219 billion in 2012 to an expected $ 122 billion in 2016. However, this does not mean that PCs can be written off - they will continue to be an important working tool both in the corporate sector and in the private sector and in the IoT world. Moreover, experts even see in part IoT in the service of PCs - temperature sensors, hard disk operating parameters, etc. Gartner leaves PC an important role in the near and relatively distant technological future. It's hard not to agree with this.
That is why while we live in a time when the main threats to the IT infrastructure are still related to the operation of hardware and software, licensing and dealing with incidents within the framework of the service department. All these tasks are easily solved by products such as Alloy Navigator and Alloy Discovery . Then we all have to change - we hope this will be an evolutionary path.
In the mid-90s, it was believed that the development of e-commerce is fundamentally impossible because of the huge security gaps in personal computers. We are witnesses of how quickly and gracefully the problem was solved. Now we face a new unknown path - the Internet of Things, which will outgrow the level of the smart home and will become at the forefront of the new technological paradigm.
For all of us, developers and companies, there are two main ways: to abandon technology and improve technology. Failure is an exclusively regression pathway that will lead to stagnation and degradation. Therefore, we need to get used to the era of IoT, to find answers to challenges. Such is the digital life in the physical world.
At the consumer electronics exhibition CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2016, projects and prototypes associated with IoT, said more than 900 companies from 3800 participants. This is an obvious trend - more and more companies, especially mobile and gadget, are seeking to acquire information about the consumer, to know more about it than he does. This is all in order to develop relationships, offer new relevant services and loyalty programs, and in other words, sell and make profits.
As always, Gartner knows most about the Internet of things. They predict that by the end of 2016, 6.4 billion of Internet-connected things will be used around the world, which is 30% more than in 2015. That is, 5.5 million new things will be connected every day. According to the same forecast, by 2020 the number of devices connected to the Internet will be 20.8 billion. These figures include not only consumer electronics, but also industrial devices.
')
It seems quite obvious. And if so, then where does the Alloy Software team and its experiences about the world of the Internet of things? In fact, not everything is so simple, we are very much so, and the Internet of things is not at all what is popular among the masses. This is not kitsch and not mass culture, this is science, these are technologies and new realities of IT infrastructure.
Define the definition
The research and analytical company already mentioned by us in its report treats IoT (Internet of Things) as a set of physical objects connected by a network and able to measure the parameters of their own state, the state of the environment and transmit the measurements. That is, these are various sensors, instruments, industrial measuring instruments, etc. Based on the logic of Gartner, things are not necessarily connected to the Internet, they can interact with each other and with the control center using M2M protocols (machine-to-machine - machine-to-machine interaction, in which machines exchange information with each other).
- With us power!
- With us, the Internet of things!
Intel is focusing on the consumer sector today (and it will not lose!). For him, one of the priorities is the development of the Internet of things suitable for the household: motion sensors, temperature, smart home systems, and so on. Plus, the company has a traditional interest in using IoT in the scientific and research fields.
At Cisco, the era of IoT is not the future, but our recent past. Even in their report of April 2011, they firmly designated the transition zone in the IoT era. In the Cisco Business Solutions Group (CBSG) report, the Internet of Things is a form of Internet existence from the moment when the number of “things” connected to the world wide web has exceeded the population of the Earth. According to their version, IoT was born somewhere in 2008-2009.
Cisco, however, goes even deeper and examines the levels of existence of the Internet of things. As of 2011, company experts describe IoT as a collection of disparate networks and argue that the development of the Internet of things is in merging this tangle of networks with security and analytics.
At the same time, Cisco is urged not to mix and not identify the concepts of “Internet” and “web”. These terms are not interchangeable. Thus, the Internet, by definition, from a report is a physical layer or network consisting of switches, routers, and other equipment. Its main function is to transport information from one point to another quickly, reliably and safely. The web, on the other hand, is the application layer on top of the Internet. Its main role is to provide an interface that makes information from the Internet useful.
In 2016, you do not need to be an industry expert to declare that the forecast was correct - we are witnessing the era of big data analysis, and many companies put the security of the Internet of things at the forefront. Why this is important - let's talk a little lower. In the meantime, let us return to the Cisco report, from which it is difficult to break away, because, being a white paper, it is not written in the language of statistics, but very much alive and in places fun. For example, so.
Holy cow!
A special report in The Economist entitled “Augmented Business” (“Growing Business”) describes a project of a Dutch start-up company, according to which cows will be connected to the Internet of things. Sensors will be implanted in the ears of the cows, which will monitor the health of the animals and track their movement. Thus, experimenters expect to provide healthy and stable gain of meat. By the way, each cow generates an average of about 200 MB of information per year.
Now more to the point. We at Alloy Software develop and sell two key products: Alloy Navigator for organizing the work of the IT service and Alloy Discovery for integrated accounting and control of the software and hardware of the enterprise. And we tried to answer: what is IoT for our business clients? At the present stage of development of the Internet of things, two narrow definitions of IoT can be distinguished.
- IoT is part of the company's integrated IT infrastructure, used sensors, instruments, various meters and meters connected to the network and servers. Here we continue to perform our function, simply expanding the list of peripheral equipment.
- IoT is data coming from wearable devices of users, for example, clients of advertising agencies, medical centers, retail, airports, etc. Such data must be absolutely protected, safety comes first. The task of our programs is the collection and processing of information about computer hardware and software of the company, the organization of service and management of IT infrastructure.
In fact, while both options are extremely rare, but we already know that IoT gets to all areas of business. So, IoT found itself in the energy and water supply (smart meters, detection of losses and sabotage), in the oil and gas sector, in medicine, in the operation of road transport and so on.
How do developers live?
Even by the number of thematic posts on Habré and Geektimes it can be judged that the development is increasingly turning towards IoT. According to the EDC report (Evans Data Corporation), in some regions of the globe, up to 62% of developers are involved in or are planning to develop applications related to IoT.
At the same time, when they are asked what challenges in the development and implementation of IoT devices, they encounter first of all, the developers answer:
- safety - 45.6%
- interoperability - 27.8%
- obsolescence - 14%
- network bandwidth - 12.2%
- other - 0.5%.
But when developing for the Internet of things, they primarily focus on:
- data analysis and aggregation - 32.8%
- firmware and pre-installed software on the client device - 18.8%
- backend / server part - 15.4%
- middleware (middleware) - 15.2%
- the ability to download applications to client devices - 10.3%
- web applications or web user interface - 6.8%
- other - 0.8%.
As you can see from the statistics, developers are concerned about just the key parameters of the Internet of things: aggregation and interpretation of data and security. Moreover, this security should be provided at all levels of information transfer, and at all stages of its passage from the source to the drive.
Challenges that IoT throws to corporate software developers
Cell operators and developers of CRM-ERP-BPM systems were among the first who faced the problem of ubiquitous access to the Internet, the growth of mobile services, social networks and the development of the IoT consumer segment. The first had to develop networks for high-speed access to the Internet, to increase capacity to maintain an enormous number of devices: tablets, smartphones, "simchaty" e-books, etc. The second ones were hit by endless demands to integrate almost with the soul of the client, namely with wearable electronics, social networks, instant messengers, and so on. By the way, in fact, the business here was notorious - the overwhelming majority were influenced by fashion, they didn’t use data before, and now they don’t know where to put gigabytes of customer data.
However, there are challenges for everyone who is developing software for corporate use. In the near future, more and more companies will strive to develop IoT and implement it in both directions: both for solving corporate-level tasks and for collecting data from customers for the purpose of product promotion.
Challenge 1. Techniques and technologies suitable for managing current IT assets may not be viable. New realities will require the development and implementation of new intelligent systems to support work with data and ensure security in IoT. And if now these are problems of availability of equipment and stable operation of data warehouses, then the tasks of ensuring ultra-security and data processing will soon come to the fore - information will be more expensive and more expensive, there will be many hunters, and their methods will be ahead of their time. For example, recently, hackers have been able to remotely gain access to a car control system.
Challenge 2. Already today, companies that work with a wide pool of clients should integrate IoT into the company's current and long-term strategies and relate opportunities and threats. The Internet of things will easily change the business models of many companies; you need to be prepared for this.
Challenge 3. Data collection, the ability to interpret them and form the basis of decision-making increases the company's flexibility, the complexity of analytics creates competitive advantages. But the data must be safely stored - any leakage is fraught with multimillion-dollar losses and reputational risks. By the way, some of the problems can always be solved with the help of software such as Alloy Software - for example, auditing computer software if it is equipped with Windows, Linux, Mac OS. Of course, not everything will turn out to be audited - for other network devices, some sort of state analysis is possible only with the support of the SNMP protocol by this device. In other cases, it is necessary to look for other solutions - and the development of such software is one of the main tasks of the future, because without monitoring and auditing the hardware and software of the IoT world, it will be difficult to deal with external and internal problems.
Call 4. Guaranteed points of vulnerability in IoT - for example, the moment of user interaction with the device. Here it is important to choose a secure and reliable authentication model. It is also worth keeping the data anonymously, in the link from the user, so you deliberately devalue the information for attackers. Of course, encryption during data transfer should also gradually reach a new level.
- Oh, this is a drone car from Google. I am not responsible for how he accelerates!
Call 5. Change testing model. The penetration of IoT into our lives greatly enhances the role of software testing. Moreover, engineers should be responsible for testing each level of information transfer, pay attention to security issues.
Challenge 6. Several levels of security management should be created - this way you can scale the project and, if during refactoring or in case of force majeure, you have to sacrifice one level of security, the rest will be preserved and ensure data integrity. It is also important to determine which device will be in control and direct efforts towards continuous monitoring of its condition.
- It is necessary to inform the boss that we have data leakage!
Challenge 7. Most unpleasant, because poorly controlled. If you use solutions of partners in your work, for example, high-tech start-ups, be prepared for the fact that they are not able to provide security in the IoT environment. Yes, today these guys are cleverly using the Internet of things, but security is a third thing for them, simply because they often don’t see their project in a year.
- Now all our devices are 100% safe.
- How did you do this?
- I turned them all off.
According to Gartner, over the past five years, global shipments of traditional PCs (desktops and laptops) have dropped from 343 million units in 2012 to about 232 million units in 2016. In terms of revenue, the global PC market has shrunk from $ 219 billion in 2012 to an expected $ 122 billion in 2016. However, this does not mean that PCs can be written off - they will continue to be an important working tool both in the corporate sector and in the private sector and in the IoT world. Moreover, experts even see in part IoT in the service of PCs - temperature sensors, hard disk operating parameters, etc. Gartner leaves PC an important role in the near and relatively distant technological future. It's hard not to agree with this.
That is why while we live in a time when the main threats to the IT infrastructure are still related to the operation of hardware and software, licensing and dealing with incidents within the framework of the service department. All these tasks are easily solved by products such as Alloy Navigator and Alloy Discovery . Then we all have to change - we hope this will be an evolutionary path.
In the mid-90s, it was believed that the development of e-commerce is fundamentally impossible because of the huge security gaps in personal computers. We are witnesses of how quickly and gracefully the problem was solved. Now we face a new unknown path - the Internet of Things, which will outgrow the level of the smart home and will become at the forefront of the new technological paradigm.
For all of us, developers and companies, there are two main ways: to abandon technology and improve technology. Failure is an exclusively regression pathway that will lead to stagnation and degradation. Therefore, we need to get used to the era of IoT, to find answers to challenges. Such is the digital life in the physical world.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/309362/
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