The management of thousands or millions of Internet connected devices is posing a major obstacle to the success of the Internet of Things, claims IoT company DevicePilot (previously 1248).
These concerns are reflected in a survey of 50 companies planning to deploy IoT applications at scale across different industry sectors including environmental and industrial monitoring, elderly care/wellness, smart homes and cities, energy management, refrigeration, retail and public services.
The survey ranked ‘risk to growth' as the most worrying consequence of failing to manage devices, followed by ‘risk to revenue' and ‘risk to brand'.
This may be one of the reasons why some of the ambitious predictions for IoT devices have not yet been borne out.
While 12% of respondents had deployed a million or more devices in the field, 82% had deployed only 1,000 devices or less.
However, respondents to the Device Management Survey expect these numbers to grow, with 70% of companies predicting an eventual market size of at least millions of devices and 20% predicting that they will reach the billions level.
"It is clear that most IoT companies are currently managing their connected products manually or by a mixture of manual and automatic processes," said Pilgrim Beart, CEO at DevicePilot.
"But as projects move from pilot to deployment at scale, the time and operational cost of manually logging-in to each device to perform an upgrade or check if it is working becomes a major barrier. Automatic asset management, monitoring and lifetime support are essential for the long term success of the IoT."