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By Jake Freivald
IoT Ubiquity Leads to Hyperconnectivity
The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to be one of the most disruptive technological advances in recent ages. In 2018, we’ll see the effects of a hyperconnected universe as IoT becomes ubiquitous. Connected refrigerators and personal electronics such as Alexa are already mainstream as sensors become less expensive. Now consider how organizations are adopting IoT—traffic cameras that register everything from license plate images to pollution levels and even traffic speed, wearables that capture health data such as your pulse, and “industrial internet” configurations that include thousands of sensors on a single manufactured item, such as a turbine.
Generating vast amounts of information, these sources will potentially provide nontraditional data, such as video and audio, which must be integrated to provide quality insights. Some intelligence will reside “at the edges,” where the sensors are; however, the data often must be analyzed in tandem with other data sources to offer value. When done correctly, IoT data offers companies unprecedented opportunities to drive efficiencies; optimize labor, energy, and other resources; cut costs; and operate more competitively. Organizations will strive to rapidly ingest, contextualize, and analyze big data from the IoT and act on information from the connected world in new ways.
We’re still at a stage when most organizations in the IoT game are integrating and analyzing the data in batches—for instance, an EMR might be updated with pulse information every 30 minutes. While batching is great to see overall trends, imagine if a doctor could spot a short heart rate spike that tends to occur 15 minutes after a medication is administered. That wouldn’t be captured by the EMR, but it’s critical for someone who wants to understand the effects of medications on patients.
As organizations realize the benefits of IoT data and their investment in analytics, they’ll begin to consider how they can squeeze more advantages from the technology, and real-time analytics is where they’ll turn.
The Enhanced Power of Embedded Analytics
As we move into 2018, organizations will finally realize they no longer need to be limited by the business applications they use. Instead, industries across the board, including health care, will embed analytics directly into those applications to unify the view of their businesses that their employees see and help them make better decisions without having to learn new tools.
Organizations Advance Their Blockchain Prowess
In 2018, blockchain technology will continue development toward reaching its full power. There are technical limitations that must be broken in order for it to become a truly enterprise-class technology for shared, nonrepudiable public or private ledgers.
In the new year, industries such as health care, financial services, supply chain, and manufacturing will begin utilizing blockchain. For these organizations, the technology’s security will prove extremely beneficial, particularly when it comes to data integrity. Even if ledgers within a single blockchain get hacked by a third party—an unlikely event to start with—those hackers would have to change the data in almost one-half of all of the ledgers in order to make the blockchain stop functioning correctly. This dramatically limits the scope of damage that can be inflicted.
Even with its security benefits, when businesses consider how to use blockchain in the coming year, it will become increasingly as important for companies to determine what they won’t share. Transparency is at the very core of the technology, so all ledgers are public among members of the same blockchain and all transactions are permanent. This presents unique challenges in that businesses will have access to the activity of all other vendors and can measure other dealings against their own. Organizations will need to develop workarounds that enable transparency where it’s desired without giving away the keys to the castle.
— Jake Freivald is vice president at Information Builders.