Three Scalability Issues Affecting IoT Adoption

Years of experience in technology have taught me a few hard lessons. The first lesson is that new technology is often over-hyped, forgetting that technology is a means, with business being the goal. As adoption begins, those steadfast few, the innovators, help us better understand the intrinsic business logic supporting adoption. A reoccurring theme, as we progress from millions to billions of devices, is scalability. Scalability is omnipresent right now; companies are pivoting around the idea. MachNation, a Boston-based analyst group, recently launched a software platform to test vendor scalability claims. However, scalability is not just a technical issue, but instead can be broken out into several topics. Invariably when we invoke IoT scalability, we begin by talking about the technological elephant in the room–How do we manage billions of devices? These devices will need to communicate securely. Building services to address billions of devices will be technically challenging, but Internet server capacity and technology stack are improving by the day.