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Gearing up for the IoT storm

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Ruchika Goel
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The Internet of Things (IoT) threatens 9 bn connected devices by 2018 – and most of the little gadgets now signing up for it cannot afford any of the internal security that protects today's connected computers. How feasible is it to test and monitor dynamic services in this fast evolving IoT system? A recently held conference in Singapore saw a gamut of industry professionals bring their heads together to discuss issues around virtualized testing, automated monitoring, real time network intelligence, data analytics, etc. The panel discussion on the topic 'Testing Times in the Internet Of Things' included Derrick Loi, Head of Cloud Business for APAC, Orange Business Services; Neil Holmquist, Senior Director Product Marketing/ Management – Cloud & IP, Spirent Communications; Helen Wong, Director, Partner & Product Strategy Asia pacific, Verizon.

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Amit Sinha Roy, Vice President, TATA Communications in his keynote address raised a question, "How many of us here believe that the Internet, as it is today, is fine and good enough for critical business networking for enterprise? The Internet has come a long way. It is something that we use every day. It is something that is a part of our lives, a part of our social as well as professional lives. So how is it that we could potentially extract more value out of the Internet, make it more business ready?"

ISSUES FACING THE CONNECTED WORLD

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Recently, there has been a lot of discussions around machine to machine, Internet of Things, Internet of Everything. IoT in a way removes the human interaction part and brings analytics systems to manage and take intelligent actions. Internet of Everything brings together the people, processes, data, and the connected things.

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"The world that IDC sees in 2020 would be of about 30 bn devices connected globally, of which one-third would be in the Asia Pacific region. One out of every five connected devices will be in China and this represents a huge market opportunity for service providers, for vendors, for everybody, for about $600 bn. Testing has always been a very critical part of the development effort and finding the bugs has always been a challenge, be it in standalone programs. But with IoT coming into the picture, when we are talking about all the devices connected, everything connected, this takes the next step," said Nikhil Batra, Research Manager – Telecommunications, IDC.

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According to the studies, enterprises are moving to the cloud and to a hybrid cloud environment. And the issues that are facing the enterprise CIOs are mostly around network security and the service-level agreements. If we also look at the way the applications are evolving, clearly the applications are now across the private, public, and the internal systems. And each of these areas today are optimized for delivering certain application parameters and certain application functionality and features, access, security and so on and so forth, which allows the companies to have a best-in-class, best-of-breed kind of applications.

Roy added, "There is a mix that is constantly changing based on business needs, based on applications as they evolve, based on regulatory reasons and so on. Now, if the CIO were to be looking at what are the top concerns, clearly the concerns that are coming out are around the network performance, security, how do you keep pace with so many service providers who have very innovative platforms which we would like to use and adopt? And obviously that leads to many suppliers and then, of course, the number of providers that one needs to connect to."

There are connectivity issues which are coming up across the public cloud, the private cloud, and in house. And this complexity is actually increasing with mobilityas users become mobile, as applications are moving off into BYOD, into a global workforce, work from home, work on the move, etc.

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Neil Holmquist showed his concern around reliability and profitability and added, "I think this is going to be the next biggest challenge outside of security. I mentioned being able to have your systems stay up and running. You have a software upgrade, what do you do? Do I upgrade my live network? I think that would be very risky. Do I need as a company to build a sandbox environment where I simulate all these devices so I can play with my software upgrades, much like service providers do, with the Cisco and Juniper equipment today? But it's going to become problematic from a scale perspective because there are so many different devices. And ultimately it boils down to profitability. All those things boil down to that. I have to spend money to test. There is no doubt about it. How much money do you want to put into it? Because a bad product, a bad experience, people will leave for other options."

From the testing perspective, IoT is not just about machine to machine. It's not just about the machine exchanging information between each other. It's also about how it relates to the processes and the workflow of the enterprise and how they engage with the end devices as well as internally within the enterprise database.

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Derrick Loi, Orange Business Services added to that, "And I think today that is an element of security and testing that has not been addressed, because we all know that a lot of enterprises who are branching into Internet of Things, they still have their legacy applications, they still have their legacy database, they still have their legacy infrastructure."

WHAT'S THE FUTURE

We are still moving towards IoT and have a long way to go. A lot of things are yet to happen. Having said that, we certainly need to prepare ourselves for the upcoming IoT storm, as although the security concerns prevail, benefits of IoT can’t be overlooked.

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