Often, the Internet of Things is talked about in terms of sensors, gateways and servers. However, the true building blocks of IoT can be broken down into four areas: things, data, insights and actions. In fact, IoT is less of a vertical market, an application, a product or even a technology. Rather, IoT is a concept, where a connected object or thing produces data that can lead to insights that your organization can use to drive action.
- Smart
- Connected
- Trusted
Artificial Intelligence
By 2021, Gartner estimates that nearly 40% of service providers’ enterprise offerings will include artificial intelligence technologies. However, often businesses struggle with implementing AI because of an unclear business need. Questions abound: Which data? What sources? What tools? What about the outcomes? These are all questions businesses must ask to power a method of analysis that anticipates and provides recommendations for the future. In other words, to turn the insights gathered from your IoT deployment into action.Adding new power to the Internet of Things
Avnet knows that all digital transformation starts with a business need and then is supported with the technology, data and people to help bring that change to life. With our product development expertise and strong technology partners, you can have one partner help you turn the buzzword of AI into a real game-changer for your business. Our global ecosystem helps you begin to not only understand what AI can do for you, but to prioritize business needs, identify the right uses cases and not just deploy artificial intelligence, but operationalize it for the benefit of your entire organization.
Edge Computing
In a traditional IoT deployment, data collected from devices is aggregated and analyzed in the cloud. However, applications such as autonomous driving or medical imaging require more real-time data collection power. Here lies the problem: Communicating up to the cloud and back isn’t fast enough to stop a car in its track or give immediate feedback on a healthcare inquiry. That’s why edge computing is transforming the Internet of Things. As IT compute shifts from the cloud, OT compute is shifting from the data center—and both are meeting in the middle at the edge, which offers lower latency and thus higher IoT deployment effectiveness.Intelligence moves to the edge
Our decades of hardware experience positions us uniquely to help organizations of all types tackle the challenge of edge computing. Avnet’s ecosystem of IoT offerings not only allow your business the support it needs to compute at the edge, but also to do it safely and connect it with the rest of the IoT ecosystem for a truly end-to-end solution.
Secure communication in a connected world
The future of the Internet of Things (IoT) means billions of devices must communicate with application servers via the internet, and with each other, without the need for people to get involved. With that comes a host of software, firmware and hardware that must be integrated to ensure each device is speaking the same language—and that security isn’t left out of the conversation, either. Even the most experienced IT departments don’t always have the capabilities in-house to tackle the biggest questions around connectivity and security.
What is IoT without the connection that brings devices together? It’s crucial for people and systems to be able to extract information out of an IoT solution, whether it’s a custom or standards-based IP network. Network topology has grown past point-to-point to consider additional network setups such as star, bus and mesh. Whether every endpoint connects to a single gateway or there are multiple linking points, there’s a tremendous amount of data in any IoT deployment. All that networking allows devices to speak different languages across communication protocols as varied as infrastructure or ad-hoc networking from WiFi, Thread, ZigBee and Bluetooth to Sigfox, LoRaWAN™ and more.Connectivity is key in IoT
Avnet’s extensive global expertise matches the right connectivity framework to your project—not just for today’s deployment, but to support your IoT solution as business needs grow and change.
End-to-end security schemes are necessary for IoT communication
Security in IoT is more than just a software update or encrypted chip. You must consider a security scheme from the beginning of the product roadmap through deployment and updates. Whether considering a fitness tracking wearable or a global industrial IoT network, secure communication has three distinct characteristics:
- Mutual authentication: each device or server within an IoT deployment should and can prove true and unique identities to each other to ensure safety of communication.
- Message integrity: messages sent between devices and servers shouldn’t be able to be hacked, altered or changed by an interfering party to ensure data privacy.
- Message confidentiality: messages should have the ability to be coded so only authorized parties have access to read them.
Companies worldwide are spending tens of billions on IoT security. Having a partner with experience in end-to-end in security can move you from initial product planning to designing, building, deploying and maintaining an IoT solution.