Sensor Innovation, Edge Computing and IoT platform development are the modern drivers to seamless IoT adoption

The Internet of Things, or IoT for short, is changing the landscape how companies do business, interact with their customers and offering new opportunities to drive internal efficiencies to drive businesses across geographies.

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have seen an evolution and this continues to change as more devices are connected with the internet offering heightened decision making which is often mediated by machines. The easy accessibility to technology, combined with a fall in the prices of communications technologies and sensors, and the increased adoption of how these technologies can be applied to verticals is driving a seamless IoT adoption.

Organisations are increasingly adopting to novice IoT application development by leveraging building blocks, and fostering strategic partners focused on the space. Here is a six-pointer IoT strategy for the modern enterprise-

 IoT Strategy Blueprint in 6 Steps 

 Step1: Understand Use cases of Early adoption

For an enterprise to begin with IoT, it needs to understand how does this technology work and what difference it will make to the enterprise when implemented. The best way is to study, brainstorm use cases from other verticals to comprehend the early signs of the transformative impact of an IoT pilot. Unlike technology trends encompassing network and telecom connectivity, IoT use cases and strategies can vary across the industry. While zeroing upon identifying applications to access sensor data, it is critical to understand the enterprise goals and what the enterprise is trying to accomplish before taking the IoT plunge.

Step2: Identify applications to access Sensor Data

The second step is to formulate an IoT capability, by understanding that the prospective IoT capability will consume data from sensors and the current sensors under testing with may no longer be available when the IoT application goes live. Hence, it is a good practice to ensure that an enterprise IoT application accesses its sensor data through a secure IoT platform.

A recommended layer of abstraction improves the sustainability of the IoT applications by paving way for flexibility to incorporate pluggable configuration of new sensors. It also helps to keep up with the innovations in sensor technology by allowing to transform and configure data from new sensors to be compatible with the existing application without changing the code.

Step3: Have a strategy to keep your data private

IoT involves massive data, which is the same across large enterprises to start-ups. To increase the potential value from IoT activities means it needs to access more sensor data. Many publicly hosted IoT platforms provide data access, storage and analytics that support IoT applications, but they need to be double-checked with data privacy, security standards and policies.

Step4: Riding the Cause of Digital Twins

IoT technology relies on collaborations from support vendors, hosted IoT platforms and so on.  This causes a need to enable virtualization at any level of the systems architecture. This virtualization of IoT capabilities is commonly referred to as creating a "digital twin" of an enterprise's IoT environment, this can be a full environment replication or a creating a twin of specific components in the environment these may include sensors, applications, etc.to be used for testing or development activities in parallel to the live production environment.

Step5: Predictive Maintenance of Sensor Health

Innovation in network connectivity and IoT sensor capability can be increased through the sensor ability to consume data from a variety of sources.

Over time, it is understood fact that these sensors require maintenance and repairs. It is thus critical to building a predictive maintenance strategy in place to report any faults before they occur, this will save massive downtimes due to low battery, failed data transmission, sensor destruction, etc.

Step6: Identify Collaboration Opportunities

IoT is one of today's most promising technologies, but it is still at a nascent stage. For an IoT strategy to be full-proof, it is thus vital to create conditions for value creation. Strategic partnerships and technical collaborations, with smaller or mid-size players having a proven history of expertise, will provide a solid source of competitive advantage to start with. That will help enterprises to accelerate their IoT implementation and better position themselves to become IoT leaders.