The challenges of standards in industrial Internet of Things

One thing industrial Internet of Things has in common with consumer IoT is that standards remain a hurdle to adoption. Industrial IoT encompasses manufacturing and machine control but also is broad and includes areas like smart cities, transportation, oil and gas, and distributed power generation.

Having a common time standard, for example, is critical to coordinating tasks on a network. Additionally, there are reliability standards related to reserving bandwidth for traffic and mechanisms for latency control so that measurements on different parts of a network can be reliably understood. If you think of a networked factory floor and you ask different nodes what time it is, you need highly consistent answer if you intend to add safe and reliable control to that network. Improving interoperability at the industrial level would create a free flow of data, which in itself is critical because it would unlock analytics and business intelligence opportunities. But to get to some of the more advanced analytics, we first need consistent and reliable data. The siloing and stranding of data will become an increasing issue for enterprise going forward.