While the internet of things (IoT) promises to take the quality of hu­man life to a new level by digitising the physical world, there are several challenges that need to be addressed to deliver on this promise. While opening up new opportunities, IoT also increases the complexity in existing systems. The cha­­llenges associated with IoT can be broad­ly classified as technological, security related, privacy related, and legal and regulatory.

  • Technological challenges: The IoT ecosystem comprises a large number of sensors, gateways and devices, which are spread over vast geographical areas, often in remote, inaccessible and private locations. A major challenge in this scenario is to ensure that all these devices are fully automated and remotely manageable. Interoperability issues can also arise as different types of sensor devices are procured from different vendors. Further, an increasing number of users and devices translate into a huge amount of data, which needs to be compiled, stored and analysed.
  • Security-related challenges: Given that the interconnection of devices is the key feature of IoT, even a single poorly secured device in the system can impact its security and resilience. Such IoT devices serve as entry points for cyberattacks. The risk is greater in the case of large-scale deployment of homogeneous IoT devices and when the devices are able to automatically connect to other devices. In addition, devices with faulty designs that may cause malfunctions can expose user data to theft by leaving data streams inadequately protected.

Further, many IoT devices operate in a manner where the user has little or no real visibility into their internal wor­kings. As a result, there are several ins­tances when a user believes that an IoT device is performing certain functions, when in reality it might be performing unwanted functions or collecting more data than the user intends. The functions of the device may also change without notice when the manufacturer provides an update, leaving the user vulnerable to challenges associated with the new software.

  • Privacy-related challenges: Products such as smart televisions that have voice recognition and vision features continuously listen to conversations or watch for activity in a room. These devices then selectively transmit this data to a cloud server for processing, which may also include a third party. The users might not be aware of this and end up sharing data with third parties unintentionally.

Moreover, most IoT devices do not have a user interface to configure privacy preferences. IoT vendors may have less incentive to offer a mechanism for users to express their privacy preferences if they regard the data that they collect as being non-personal data. Moreover, users in several cases may not be comfortable in sharing any kind of data, even if it is not considered as personal by vendors.

  • Legal and regulatory challenges: IoT devices create new legal and policy challenges while amplifying existing ones. Data collected by IoT devices is not typically constrained by jurisdictional boundaries. IoT devices can collect data about people in one jurisdiction and transmit the same to another jurisdiction for storage or processing, often with few or no technical roadblocks. This may have legal ramifications if the data collected is deemed to be personal or sensitive and subject to data protection laws of multiple jurisdictions. To further complicate matters, the data protection laws of the jurisdiction where the data is collected might be inconsistent or incompatible with the laws of the jurisdiction where the data is stored and processed.

Challenges for emerging and developing economies

While internet infrastructure has spread rapidly across the developing world, it has several gaps that prevent reliable, high speed and affordable internet access in most of the emerging economies. For instance, the limited data centre infrastructure in emerging economies hinders IoT deployment. Further, the extent to which IoT can transform industries in emerging economies in the long run remains unclear. Moreover, the governments of these countries are still figuring out their role in IoT solution deployment.

The way forward

To drive the uptake of IoT across the world, it is crucial to overcome the existing challenges. Addressing problems related to data management, automation of devices and sensors, and upgradation of device technology is the key. There is also a need to deal with security- and privacy-related issues to ensure greater reliability amongst customers. There should be proper mechanisms in place to ensure IoT deployment in emerging economies, which have different and unique requirements as compared to the developed countries, which are more technologically advanced. Spectrum management requires special attention in these economies, given that wireless technology is the backbone of IoT implementation.