Making The Internet Of Things A Reality

Jan Jongboom explores development challenges driven by the IoT and how these can be addressed in 2017

As developers, we’ve always understood the potential for the Internet of Things market and its ability to impact our everyday lives. However, while recent headline technology shows such as the Consumer Electronics Show and Mobile World Congress have highlighted exciting new IoT concepts, there’s still much that needs to be done in terms of addressing the security and data integration challenges to bring products to scale and maturity.

Lately we seem to hear more about painful IoT project failures – due, in part, to security issues – than we do about IoT successes. The smart home may be one of the biggest IoT markets but the elements that make up the market remain in their infancy. Even some of the biggest successes in this market so far – take the connected light bulb for instance – remain standalone products in constrained environments, perhaps more ‘remote control’ than IoT in its truest sense.

Now, when consumer IoT products do arrive to market, they still do not ensure that robust security measures are baked in. If hacked, these products could in theory put personal consumer data at risk. The burden of responsibility we, as developers, shoulder when building secure connected consumer products, is great.

Yes, we are encouraged by the rising wave of digital assistants such as Amazon Echo, which seem to have overcome the security and adoption obstacles – for the moment at least. But, for the most part, we remain cautiously optimistic with regards to further successful IoT project rollouts.

As the numbers of connected devices grows from hundreds of thousands to millions and then billions of devices, security issues are compounded by the fact that the attack surface increases. One bug in a single system component can compromise all others and many of these devices are connected to an entire IP stack, increasing the chance of popular hacks such as denial of service (DDOS) attacks.