IoT is pervasive in countless industries – from smart utilities and health to security and automotive, among countless other sectors. While connected devices continue to become more central to business and service operations, providing benefits across efficiency, safety, convenience, and cost savings, its rollout is not without challenge.
We recently caught up with IoT Now to talk all things IoT, and how its successful rollout and lifecycle relies upon a foundation of optimised connectivity, security, and compliance.
We’ve broken down the key takeaways from our conversation…
Q – What are some of the challenges and considerations facing the IoT market?
Expertise
While many OEMs see value in cellular connectivity, they may lack the experience and expertise to integrate it, especially if it’s a new area of focus for the company. Understanding the cellular technology, the network options, and best practices can be a significant hurdle.
Connectivity management and quality of coverage
Ensuring the best connectivity – in terms of coverage, price and usage – depending on where any particular device is deployed is also challenging. Cellular can be complex to deploy as well, with multiple stock keeping units (SKUs) for multiple connectivity providers.
Manufacturers must have the ability to provide consistent connection and fluid handover between connectivity providers within its coverage. For example, for a well-functioning supply chain across multiple levels and geographies, data must be collected, integrated, and analysed to provide a single view of the supply chain at any time or location. This requires very high quality of coverage of the IoT solution end-to-end.
Security and privacy
IoT devices can be vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, and ensuring security of data and devices is a critical concern. With IoT security threats rapidly evolving, understanding the issues in security is challenging – yet it is also becoming much more important to get right.
The potential reputational damage to a brand in the market due to a security breach is escalating quickly, as are the potential legal and liability costs and the cost of downtime in operations. And although security can be complex and costly to implement and deploy, the costs of a breach could be huge.
Trust
This is also of fundamental importance because security engenders trust. There must be trust in the connection and trust that the data transferred has not been corrupted in any way. Data collection and analysis is the basis of IoT for making decisions and actions. Without trust, there is no prospect of remote monitoring or control and the IoT cannot function.
Device durability
IoT devices may also be deployed in challenging environments, such as extreme temperatures or harsh conditions. Ensuring device durability and reliability in these environments requires specific hardware and software. Regarding scalability too, as the number of IoT devices grows, ensuring that the IoT solution being used can scale to accommodate all of them is essential.
Device lifetime is often critical, especially when it is embedded in larger and more complex systems where MRO activities could be complex. Closely related to this is the power requirement, particularly where the device is reliant on batteries that must last for up to ten years in some cases.
Contract duration can be an important consideration depending on user sensitivity to the need for flexibility and fear of stickiness to one MNO. For long life devices, such as smart meters, there may be a need to consider changing the MNO during the lifetime of the device in the field.
Q – What does Thales’ solution look like?
To define and deploy an IoT connected device there are different stages. Thales provides solutions at each of these stages and helps the OEM to select the best technical solution to meet the specific objectives and use cases for its IoT devices. Thales identifies three main steps during the life of an IoT device: Build, Run and Protect:
- Build covers the device design and engineering
- Run encompass the device production and the deployment in the field from first activation through to decommission
- Protect for cyber protection is transversal across the full device and application lifecycle
Q – What use case can you share?
Smart metering, or more globally smart utilities, covers energy with electricity and gas, and water. This is a highly important area right now due to the increasing need to manage scarce resources and respond to climate change issues. These have raised the need for real time monitoring and analysis of consumption and leakages. With this in mind there are several challenges where Thales solutions can help lifecycle management of the device:
- Design: simplification of the device ‘build’ with a soldered eSIM – avoiding complex sourcing
- Production: a single stock-keeping unit (SKU) ready to be deployed all over the world versus many regional SKUs, complicating logistics and manufacturing processes
- Installation: Out-of-the-box first installation, with automatic connection to the best network versus trying multiple SIMs from different MNOs
- Operation: many events can impact the connectivity in the field (network quality) with consequences for disruption of the data flow. Five, ten or 15 years is a long period of time and there may be a need to adapt the connectivity plan for business reasons. To avoid a costly truck roll, being able to remotely change temporarily or permanently the connectivity provider.
Across all these steps, cyber protection is of the utmost importance: avoid data hacking and device identity theft; protect and guarantee service delivery and continuity.
To find out more about Thales’ IoT solutions, and its ‘Build, Run, Protect’ strategic blueprint, take a look here: https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/digital-identity-and-security/iot
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