Concerns Over IoT

To gather insights on the current and future state of IoT, we talked to 23 executives involved with IoT. We asked them, "What are your biggest concerns regarding the state of IoT today and who is addressing these concerns?"

Security

• Security. See more awareness for the product and the need to monetize sooner rather than later. Most relevant use cases. Insights from streams of data.
• Odd backdoor into your home network.
• Security of PII.
• How much do I trust these devices? Concern over privacy and security.

Standards

• There is no standardization in the industry for device communication. No one is really invested in solving this issue, even though the huge players like Google or Amazon could lead the movement toward standardization. There are also issues with security, data transfer issues, and GDPR compliance issues. We also face a lack of security in many devices. For example, devices come with predefined factory passwords that are never changed. The first wave of IoT was very insecure but we’re seeing a shift towards a security-first mindset. 
• The two biggest concerns we see today are a lack of standardization and the inability to update devices already in the field. The IoT industry seems to be re-learning the same lessons regarding security which has evolved over time in other computing industries. Best practices like the ability to update a device (not including hard-coded accounts) and restricting access to authorized users are rampant problems in the industry today. We are seeing pushes from companies like ARM with the Platform Security Architecture (PSA) to standardize the development environment for IoT devices. A standardized and open source development environment should make things like in-field updates easier and more efficient. This will allow more secure devices with less time required by the manufacturers to implement security best practices. There is also an IETF draft for the manufacturer usage descriptions (MUD). This would help to ensure the balance of usability in deploying devices while allowing networks to be more secure. The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence(NCCoE) is currently working with industry stakeholders to help mitigate IoT-based threats using the IETF MUD technology. 
• Lack of standards. How to deploy Hardware.

Other

• Major players falter or struggle because they developed very expensive solutions that were too expensive for companies to buy or see a timely ROI on. Start small and see use cases succeed over 12 to 18 months before rolling out on a larger scale.
• Lack of skilled professionals who know how to use IoT data to solve business problems. Vendors just wanting to sell platforms rather than helping clients solve business problems.
• Companies’ ability to deliver the last mile of the project – end-to-end integration.
• Complexity. Customers are failing with their IoT initiatives, they stop the initiative. These customers will be disrupted by those that are successfully implementing IoT and making the digital transformation.
• When people are just connecting devices because they can without defining the business value of doing so. This is rarely successful without a specific use case. Ensure the business case has a good ROI.
• Companies drowning in data with no plan to use it.

Here’s who we spoke to:

• Adam Fingerman, CXO and Co-founder, and Troy Petersen, Marketing Director, ArcTouch
• Andreas Pettersson, CTO and CPO, Arcules
• Sean Grundy, CEO and Founder, Bevi
• Jeff Bonnell, V.P. of Industry Solutions, Coresystems
• Eli Feldman, CTO, Advanced Technology, EPAM
• Brent Pietrzak, V.P. Producer Solutions and Strategy, Flexera
• Scott Allen, CMO, FreeWave
• Mark Herring, CMO, Tim Hall, V.P. of Products, Brian Mullen, V.P. of Business Development, InfluxData
• Dipti Borkar, V.P. of Product Marketing, Kinetica
• Crystal Valentine, V.P. of Technology Strategy, MapR
• Jesse Robbins, CEO, Orion Labs
• Lars Knoll, CTO, Qt
• Olivier Pauzet, V.P. and General Manager IoT Solutions, Sierra Wireless
• Jens-Ole Graulund, CTO, Spiio
• Monte Zweben, CEO, Splice Machine
• Shawn Reynolds, CMO, Telit
• Yu Xu, CEO, TigerGraph
• Ray Wu, Founder and CEO, Wynd
• Alex Kubicek, CEO, Understory
• Jeff Finn, CEO, zvelo