Contractnet whitepaper

Internet of Things (IoT) in the Federal Government

whitePaper | June 8, 2021

The Internet of Things is one of the most impactful IT innovations of our time. As consumers, we already encounter the IoT in our daily lives with smart items such as TVs, watches, and phones. As we journey further in time, IoT will become a ubiquitous aspect of life at home and in the workplace. Gartner defines the IoT as the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment.” More simply, IoT devices are computers (typically very small), that are embedded into an object to perform a function (e.g., collect data, run software) and connect to a network (e.g., the internet). For example, an IoT device could be an assembly line sensor capable of detecting minute deficiencies and determining when equipment needs repair.

How is the IoT world shaping up in 2021 and what trends will influence the future of IoT?

whitePaper | June 8, 2021

Despite the close of a tumultuous 2020 and the start of 2021, connected devices will continue to shape the future of numerous industries and businesses are confident that the Internet of Things (IoT) will play a key role in the future success of their trade. Several trends continue to gather momentum, stimulating IoT’s prominence in 2021, from Industrial IoT devices to health-and-safety applications as COVID-19 continues to take center stage. Here are a few facts, figures and trends, gathered across the web, that can help us understand where the IoT world is at, how it’s been impacted by the pandemics, and what to expect over the next few years.

Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT

whitePaper | June 2, 2021

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a rapidly expanding world of connected objects. As IIoT systems proliferate, large amounts of data are consumed by machine learning algorithms and shared between partners, customers and others. IIoT is a technology environment in which integration and interoperability are critical capabilities and the complexity of this environment makes this difficult to achieve. Standards play a critical role in IIoT for five main reasons. First, users and vendors cannot engineer a custom interface every time components or systems need to interact. Standards can make this explosion of interfaces manageable; they are the lingua franca for interoperability. For suppliers, this eliminates needless costs related to common capabilities instead encouraging a focus on innovations that add value.

IoT at the Edge: HOW AI WILL TRANSFORM IOT ARCHITECTURE

whitePaper | May 23, 2021

The vast amounts of data constantly collected by the billions of sensors and devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) can pose a serious processing challenge for businesses that rely on traditional intelligence and analytics tools. An emerging solution is to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to build intelligent systems that automatically gather, process, and extract actionable insights from IoT data - in real time without the need for human intervention. How are AI-enabled systems transforming IoT devices and applications at the edge, and what are some of the emerging use cases we can expect to see in the near future?

Establishing Confidence in IoT Device Security: How do we get there?

whitePaper | May 14, 2021

The purpose of this draft paper is to start a conversation about what it means to have confidence in the cybersecurity of IoT devices used by individuals and organizations and the various ways of gaining that confidence. This paper describes the landscape of confidence mechanisms that are currently available for establishing the security of IoT devices in the marketplace. In preparing this paper, NIST conducted extensive research on initiatives that can help to instill confidence in IoT device security and held a series of meetings with government and industry experts to glean information on the unique aspects and challenges in this space.

Tailoring IoT platforms to the requirements of specific use cases

whitePaper | April 13, 2021

The Internet of Things has evolved in the last 10-15 years from a long-term visionary idea to our current reality, present in more and more domains of our everyday lives. Many IoT architectures and platforms are being proposed today by various academic and industrial consortia, in domains as diverse as smart manufacturing, smart homes, smart cities or smart transport, to name just a few. These different IoT platforms have many things in common, as they all rely on connecting some smart sensor and actuator devices to each other and to the Internet, providing value-added services and applications to us, human users, either directly, or in an indirect manner. However, by closely analyzing their structure and operational focus, we can observe that these IoT architectures and platforms have also special features tailored to the requirements of different use cases.