Future Direction of the IIoT

All of the chapters in this book have covered the technical building blocks for developers to build IoT applications, especially for industrial domains. In this final chapter, we will look at the potential directions in which the industry will get pulled by the various forces of business and technological evolution. The goal is to paint a picture of the near future and help the reader prepare in terms of technology to support the solution holistically.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

• Emerging use cases for the IIoT
• IoT industry standards and their evolution
• IoT security challenges and opportunities
• Blockchain for the IoT and security
• Machine learning and the IoT
• The IIoT landscape and market direction

Introduction

As we have discussed in this book, the IIoT covers all aspects of data capture and processing. A complete IIoT product is a comprehensive end-to-end solution that should cover data capture, ingestion, storage, search, analytics, and visualization. As we touched upon in previous chapters, most of these areas have a number of products on the market that can satisfy most requirements. Hence, building a good IIoT solution is about choosing the right technology stack and creating the right interfaces to achieve non-functional requirements such as scalability and high performance. As the technology stack evolves, so will solutions to address key gaps that we see today as blocking the progress of the IIoT. Some of this will be driven by the needs and issues that we will see in deployments (such as security) and some of these will be driven by rapid evolution in related areas...

Summary

So far, the journey for the IIoT, and the IoT in general, has been a mixed bag of some successes and many learning opportunities. However, major accomplishments in basic infrastructure have already been accomplished in areas such as cloud offerings for IoT-specific solutions, and carriers providing all ranges of wireless communications. This will certainly springboard IoT development and adoption in the coming years. Still, much work remains to be done in key areas such as addressing security and privacy issues on the cloud and high-performance computing and low-power consumption on the edge. These are the areas in which most of the work will be done and successful players will emerge over the next two years.