It's not much of a secret that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big thing in technology. We're seeing it in our everyday lives with wearables, smart cars, and home automation. However, the real big splash will be in industry and business. Enterprises will be looking to gain better ability to lower costs, increase productivity, and break into new markets by leveraging IoT. Gartner is predicting approximately 26 Billion devices in use by 2020, although others have predicted as much as 34 Billion. Business and industrial devices are likely to account for more than two thirds of that number.
With this surge of new network addressable computing devices out there, there will be accompanying surges in the data these devices generate and the data involved in supporting and managing them. As a result, the IT and business resources required to support IoT will surge as well. Just to keep them up and running there will be more incidents, problems, and changes.
Security is also impacted with so many new devices to keep account of and lock down. This may be the scariest problem of them all. IoT is a young industry and many of the players have not yet learned the hard lessons that the software industry shouldered over the past few decades. They are just beginning to see how and where IoT poses a risk to the rest of the IT world. Take for example the DDoS attack the hit the internet last October. IoT comprised a very large bulk of the exploited network addressable devices. The perpetrators were easily able to compromise IoT device vulnerabilities and used it take down very significant and important internet resources. The impact ended up crippling us all that day. Heed this as a warning…this is only the beginning.
IT organizations that are not prepared to handle this will be overwhelmed quickly. And the promise of lower costs and increased productivity will get lost on corralling in the chaos that ensues. Risk exposure will increase as the opportunity for security vulnerabilities grows with volume and variation of all these IoT devices in the enterprise.
It all seems daunting on the surface, but the good news here is that leveraging your Service Management processes will help keep it under control. Incident, Problem, and Change Management processes will need to scale accordingly. Automation will be central to stay on top of it all. Pay careful attention to Asset and Configuration management. IoT devices will be highly interconnected. Relationships will matter. Knowing what is connected to what and what service it supports is essential to understand since it will drive policy. A strong CMDB or asset repository will be necessary to inventory your IoT landscape. It will help you keep it all straight and enable you to automate effectively.
Keep your IoT inventory service aware. That is, it should provide you good visibility into what devices you have, how these devices support the business, what services they deliver, and ensure that they are they operating as expected. To get there consider the following key capabilities:
- Self-Registration/Discovery - Accurately and reliably identify devices on your network. If possible, identify them as they are added and enabled. Devices should be able to identify themselves, register what their capabilities are, as well as how and where they are configured.
- Service Mapping - You will want to clearly understand how devices impact and are tied to the services they support. Leveraging automated Service Discovery and Mapping will paint that picture. And be wary of attempting to keep up with this without automation, it will move way faster than you expect. Be ready to handle this with automated service mapping.
- Automated Management - The core components to IoT automation this will be an IoT management platform, an event management processor, an orchestration engine, and your CMDB/Asset repository. The IoT management platform will facilitate the direct interaction with devices. Event management will interact with the IoT platform receiving notifications of changes to the IoT landscape and alerts of operational level data. Orchestration will send instructions to the IoT platform. And the CMDB/Asset repository will store IoT device operating meta data such as KPIs and thresholds that drive operating and service policy.
Leveraging these capabilities will provide the foundation for good IoT governance. It can't be emphasized enough, you will be dealing with volumes and variety of overwhelming proportions. It will be next to impossible to stay on top of manually.
The benefits of using IoT in your enterprise are significant. It will have transformative impact to the way you do business. The realization of improvements to productivity, innovation, lowering costs and driving top line growth can be achieved. Leveraging automation and understanding service awareness for IoT management will pave the way to avoid the pitfalls that are already out there and are only going to get worse.
