The internet of things (IoT) is slowly but progressively changing the way businesses are functioning in India.
The concept is gaining ground as a large number of enterprises across sectors such as healthcare, technology, housing, manufacturing, infrastructure and transportation realise the importance of using interconnected and automated machines to conduct preventive maintenance, reduce process downtime, enhance business efficiencies, minimise resource wastage, track inventory and enable better monitoring. IoT is also being envisaged as the backbone of the government’s Digital India vision, particularly in the setting up of smart cities.
Achieving an IoT economy, however, will not be an easy process. One, IoT is a long-term vision, which will continue to be ‘work in progress’ for many years to come. IoT as a concept is evolving, with companies still finding the best fit to adopt these solutions. Two, IoT is not a stand-alone technology but a combination of various technologies that are converging to deliver value to businesses. It is not easy to convert a multitude of dumb objects into smart devices overnight, and that too without a standardised framework. Businesses would need appropriate infrastructure and solutions to capture and analyse the humongous amount of data being generated on networks, intelligently and on a real-time basis.
There is thus a strong need to develop a common framework, or a set of industry-agnostic standards, which can be uniformly adopted across various sectors for IoT adoption. So far, all research and development work in the IoT space has been scattered and fragmented. To this end, a single secure platform is required to tie all the gadgets and technologies together.
Moreover, as IoT adoption gains momentum, concerns around data privacy, data sovereignty and security would need to be resolved, going forward.
