Applications

Applications hosted in the cloud or data centers provide features, reporting, and analytic functions for IoT systems. Applications can be consumer-facing, business-facing, industrial, health-care or municipal. Applications can also be management focused, providing the ability to control, monitor, and configure IoT devices, as in the following examples: 

• Consumer-facing IoT applications include smart switches and light bulbs, connected thermostats, garage door openers, wearables, connected cars, and small unmanned aerial systems (drones).
• Business-facing IoT applications include store sensors that collect and analyze shopping behavior to make predictions, tailor marketing, and personalize consumer experiences.
• Industrial IoT applications include smart manufacturing systems, industrial robotic systems, and predictive analytics to identify likely failures before they occur and optimize maintenance actions. Industrial IoT applications can also include smart industrial control systems.
• IoT health-care applications can include connected devices such as pacemakers, smart diagnostic tools, and connected hospitals and equipment.
• Municipal IoT applications include smart transportation systems, connected park systems, and smart sensor systems that collect environmental and other information.

The architecture of IoT enterprise systems is relatively consistent across industries. Enterprise architects integrate solutions that include edge devices, gateways, applications, transports, cloud services, protocols, data analytics, and storage.

Indeed, some enterprises may find that they must utilize IoT capabilities typically found in other industries and served by new or unfamiliar technology providers. Consider a typical Fortune 500 company that may own both manufacturing and retail facilities. This company's business executives may consider deploying smart manufacturing systems, including sensors that track industrial equipment health status, robotics that perform various manufacturing functions, as well as sensors that provide data used to optimize the overall manufacturing process. Some of the deployed sensors may even be embedded right in their own products to add instrumentation and/or customer-engagement features. 

This same company may also consider how to leverage the IoT to offer enhanced retail experiences to their customers, such as smart billboards integrated with vehicle infotainment systems to allow customized advertisements to consumers as they pass by a retail establishment. 

That same company may require the ability to manage fleets of connected cars and shipping vehicles, drone systems that support the inspection of critical infrastructure and facilities, agricultural sensors that are embedded into the ground to provide feedback on soil quality, and even sensors embedded in concrete to provide feedback on the curing process at their construction sites. 

This complexity introduces challenges to keeping the IoT secure and ensuring that particular instances of the IoT cannot be used as a pivoting point to attack other enterprise systems and applications. For this, organizations must employ the services of enterprise security architects who can look at the IoT from the big picture perspective. Security architects will need to be critically involved early in the design process to establish security requirements that must be tracked and followed through during the development and deployment of the enterprise IoT system.

It is much too expensive to attempt to integrate security later on. Enterprise security architects will select the infrastructure and backend system components that can easily scale to support not only the massive quantities of IoT-generated data, but also have the ability to make secure, actionable sense of all of that data.

The following diagram provides a representative view of a generic enterprise IoT system of systems and showcases the IoT's dynamic and diverse nature:

In this diagram we see energy IoT deployments connected to the cloud along with connected vehicle roadside equipment, health-care equipment, and environmental monitoring sensors. This is not accidental—as previously discussed, one principal feature of IoT is that anything can be connected to everything and everything to anything. It is perfectly conceivable that a health-care biosensor both connects to a hospital's monitoring and data analytic system and simultaneously communicates power consumption data to local and remote energy monitoring equipment and systems.

The growing number of points of connectivity across diverse systems increases the attack surface of an enterprise; therefore, IoT system interconnections must be thoroughly evaluated to understand the threats and required mitigations.