Fredric Paul
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Fredric Paul
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IoT has an obsolescence problem
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a long way from becoming a mature technology. From wearable devices to industrial sensors and consumer conveniences, IoT vendors and users are still trying to figure out what the technology does best as it grows into a $9 trillion market by 2020 (according to some estimates).And yet, IoT is somehow already faced with a huge and growing problem of obsolescence. The problem, ironically, lies in the “things” themselves.Apple Watch: A premature antique Don’t believe me? Consider the solid gold Apple Watch Edition, launched in 2015 and sold for $10,000 to as much as $17,000 a pop. A traditional watch at that price point would be expected to last decades, perhaps even generations as it turns into a family heirloom. But with the announcement of Apple Watch OS 5 at the company’s World Wide Developers Conference this week, the original version of these fancy timepieces can no longer keep up. They simply won’t run the latest version of the operating system due out this fall, and they won’t have the features of brand-new Apple Watches that cost a tiny fraction of that amount.To read this article in full, please click here
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What happens if IoT security doesn’t get solved?
Sometimes, confirmation of the obvious can be really important. At least, that’s how I felt when I saw a new Bain & Company report, Cybersecurity Is the Key to Unlocking Demand in IoT. According to the consulting firm’s survey, 45 percent of Internet of Things (IoT) buyers say “concerns about security remain a significant barrier and are hindering the adoption of IoT devices.” Worries over IoT security are hardly news, of course. I’ve been writing about them here on Network World for a while, and a quick internet search for IoT security rains down more than a million hits.To read this article in full, please click here
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What happens if IoT security doesn’t get solved?
Sometimes, confirmation of the obvious can be really important. At least, that’s how I felt when I saw a new Bain & Company report, Cybersecurity Is the Key to Unlocking Demand in IoT. According to the consulting firm’s survey, 45 percent of Internet of Things (IoT) buyers say “concerns about security remain a significant barrier and are hindering the adoption of IoT devices.” Worries over IoT security are hardly news, of course. I’ve been writing about them here on Network World for a while, and a quick internet search for IoT security rains down more than a million hits.To read this article in full, please click here
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Somehow, AWS and cloud growth continues to accelerate
If the numbers weren’t so clear, I’m not sure I’d have believed it was possible. After all, an enormous business that earned $17.46 billion in 2017 and grew approximately 45 percent is bound to slow down, right? Simply maintaining that insane level of growth would be virtually impossible, right?But somehow, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is actually boosting its growth. After expanding by 42 percent in the third quarter of 2017, AWS increased that number to 45 percent in the fourth quarter … and then did it again, growing 49 percent in the first quarter of calendar 2018.To read this article in full, please click here
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Somehow, AWS and cloud growth continues to accelerate
If the numbers weren’t so clear, I’m not sure I’d have believed it was possible. After all, an enormous business that earned $17.46 billion in 2017 and grew approximately 45 percent is bound to slow down, right? Simply maintaining that insane level of growth would be virtually impossible, right?But somehow, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is actually boosting its growth. After expanding by 42 percent in the third quarter of 2017, AWS increased that number to 45 percent in the fourth quarter … and then did it again, growing 49 percent in the first quarter of calendar 2018.To read this article in full, please click here
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5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations
Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here
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5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations
Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here
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5 key enterprise IoT security recommendations
Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here
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Is the cloud already killing the enterprise data center?
“Friends don't let friends build data centers.”That slogan wasn’t even printed on a real T-shirt you could buy. It was just one of the choices in an online poll to choose what Amazon Web Services CTO Werner Vogels should wear. But it pretty much captured the mood at the AWS Summit San Francisco last week, where Vogels gave the opening keynote to some 9,000 cloud-loving attendees. On stage, Vogels crowed about multiple enterprises abandoning large numbers of data centers in order to move their workloads to the cloud. He cited Cox Automotive—the company behind Autotrader, Dealer.com, Kelley Blue Book, and many more car-shopping brands—“going all in on AWS” and closing more than 40 data centers. He noted that U.K. news provider News International is shutting down 60 data centers, and GE is closing approximately 30 data centers. And Vogels mentioned that the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice was moving to AWS, as well, though he didn’t say whether it was closing any data centers in the process.To read this article in full, please click here
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Is the cloud already killing the enterprise data center?
“Friends don't let friends build data centers.”That slogan wasn’t even printed on a real T-shirt you could buy. It was just one of the choices in an online poll to choose what Amazon Web Services CTO Werner Vogels should wear. But it pretty much captured the mood at the AWS Summit San Francisco last week, where Vogels gave the opening keynote to some 9,000 cloud-loving attendees. On stage, Vogels crowed about multiple enterprises abandoning large numbers of data centers in order to move their workloads to the cloud. He cited Cox Automotive—the company behind Autotrader, Dealer.com, Kelley Blue Book, and many more car-shopping brands—“going all in on AWS” and closing more than 40 data centers. He noted that U.K. news provider News International is shutting down 60 data centers, and GE is closing approximately 30 data centers. And Vogels mentioned that the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice was moving to AWS, as well, though he didn’t say whether it was closing any data centers in the process.To read this article in full, please click here
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The future of enterprise IoT
Whether you were aware or not, Monday, April 9, 2018, is World IoT Day:"IoTday is an open invitation to the Internet of Things community to participate in an event, host a hackathon, or just share a beer/coffee with a friend or fellow collaborator focused around the IoT and its implications."Now, IoT Day may not top your list of favorite holidays, but it seemed like a good time to take a moment and assess the future of the Internet of Things. In that light, I traded emails with some technical experts from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on the future of IoT in the enterprise. Their responses were illuminating.To read this article in full, please click here
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People are really worried about IoT data privacy and security—and they should be
A new study from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) shows that consumers around the world are deeply worried about in how their personal information is collected and shared by the Internet of Things (IoT). But let’s be honest, the problem isn’t that unsophisticated consumers are panicking for no reason. In fact, consumers are merely picking up on the very real inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding IoT data.Businesses are also worried about IoT security I’ll get into the results and implications of the survey in a moment, but first I want to note that business and professionals are equally concerned. Perhaps that’s why Gartner just predicted that IoT security spending will hit $1.5 billion by the end of the year, up 28 percent from 2017, and more than double to $3.1 billion by 2021.To read this article in full, please click here
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People are really worried about IoT data privacy and security—and they should be
A new study from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) shows that consumers around the world are deeply worried about in how their personal information is collected and shared by the Internet of Things (IoT). But let’s be honest, the problem isn’t that unsophisticated consumers are panicking for no reason. In fact, consumers are merely picking up on the very real inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding IoT data.Businesses are also worried about IoT security I’ll get into the results and implications of the survey in a moment, but first I want to note that business and professionals are equally concerned. Perhaps that’s why Gartner just predicted that IoT security spending will hit $1.5 billion by the end of the year, up 28 percent from 2017, and more than double to $3.1 billion by 2021.To read this article in full, please click here
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Most insurance carriers not ready to use IoT data
You might think that the Internet of Things (IoT) was custom made for the insurance industry. After all, what could be more useful to all those actuarial tables than detailed, real-world information from billions of IoT sensors in a wide variety of devices? In fact, we’re already seeing the beginnings of insurance uses of IoT, including auto insurance companies that give discounts for drivers willing to have their vehicles—and their driving habits—tracked.But according to a new IoT and the State of the Insurance Industry Study from LexisNexis, the message hasn’t penetrated very far into the famously conservative field. Top-line results from the survey reveal a clear disconnect between what insurance companies think about IoT and what they’re actually doing about it.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM’s Watson, known for AI, takes on IoT
IBM’s Watson has earned fame besting Jeopardy! champions. But now the artificial intelligence (AI) platform is rolling out Watson Assistant, designed to “help bridge the information and data sharing gap between people and things.”Announced this morning at the IBM THINK 2018 conference in Las Vegas, an IBM spokesperson described Watson Assistant in an email as “an AI assistant for enterprises that can be accessed via voice or text interaction. Watson Assistant is helping businesses transform their customer experiences by bringing together data on all the places and things consumers interact with daily.” Watson Assistant is designed to be embedded in a wide variety of things, from cars to conference rooms, retail stores to banks.To read this article in full, please click here
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Big trouble down on the IoT farm
You would think that modern farms would be fertile ground for the Internet of Things (IoT). And in many ways, you’d be right: Smart tractors and other farm equipment, coupled with GPS-equipped smart sensors tracking everything temperature to moisture to soil acidity, mean the IoT can help today’s high-tech farmers plant and harvest more efficiently than ever before.Who benefits from IoT on the farm? But if you believe a recent expose in Motherboard, all is not well down on the IoT farm. It turns out that many of the benefits of IoT — and the big data it generates — in agriculture fall not to the farmers, but to the so-called BigAg equipment makers and seed and fertilizer companies.To read this article in full, please click here
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7 transportation IoT predictions from Cisco
Cisco is one of the biggest proponents — and potential beneficiaries — of the Internet of Things (IoT). The networking giant is pushing IoT solutions in a number of areas, not least of which is the transporation sector.To learn more about how the company sees the future of IoT playing out in the world of connected transporation, I spoke (via email) with Kyle Connor, Cisco’s transportation industry principal.Connor covered a lot of ground, but here are what I consider his seven most important points, along with my reactions to them:To read this article in full, please click here
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Is the IoT backlash finally here?
As pretty much everyone knows, the Internet of Things (IoT) hype has been going strong for a few years now. I’ve done my part, no doubt, covering the technology extensively for the past 9 months. As vendors and users all scramble to cash in, it often seems like nothing can stop the rise IoT.Maybe not, but there have been rumblings of a backlash to the rise of IoT for several years. Consumer and experts worry that the IoT may not easily fulfill its heavily hyped promise, or that it will turn out to be more cumbersome than anticipated, allow serious security issues, and compromise our privacy.To read this article in full, please click here
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Is the IoT backlash finally here?
As pretty much everyone knows, the Internet of Things (IoT) hype has been going strong for a few years now. I’ve done my part, no doubt, covering the technology extensively for the past 9 months. As vendors and users all scramble to cash in, it often seems like nothing can stop the rise IoT.Maybe not, but there have been rumblings of a backlash to the rise of IoT for several years. Consumer and experts worry that the IoT may not easily fulfill its heavily hyped promise, or that it will turn out to be more cumbersome than anticipated, allow serious security issues, and compromise our privacy.To read this article in full, please click here
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The internet will miss John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow, who died in San Francisco last week at age 70, was an important pioneer for internet freedom. But he was much, much more than that. He was the kind of Renaissance Man that today’s internet moguls can’t even dream of emulating. And that is a huge loss for the world of technology — and the world at large.Barlow’s wide-ranging influence You may not have heard of Barlow, but you’ve probably been influenced by him in a wide variety of surprising ways. For one thing, he was a co-founder — and at his passing, vice chairman — of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is considered “the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.” Back in 1990, when the EFF was formed, Barlow helped popularize the term “cyberspace.” He was a director of the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), the seminal online community, and he was an influential early voice at Wired magazine.To read this article in full, please click here