Trends for 2021: Internet of Things

There is no secret that IoT development will not stop in 2021 and will be one of the main trends for the next year. According to the expectations, the IoT hardware and software marketplace will grow to $520 billion in 2021. Thanks to the Bluetooth trackers, point of sale (POS) beacons, IoT becomes a standard technology we use like mobile phones or home wifi. All the more interesting to know which essential technologies the Internet of things needs to develop. According to Gartner, the world's leading research and advisory company, the top 10 IoT challenges need to be solved in 2021 will be:

Any IoT devices and platforms have to be secured and protected from information attacks and physical impact. The point of this issue I that most things - members of the IoT- are elementary and can't support complicated solutions. A secure solution for the IoT must be simple and very reliable.

The "things" of IoT will collect and accumulate the new types of information which have to be processing and using for marketing or other purposes. Thus we will be faced with the need to create new analytic tools and algorithms. This trend is very likely to continue over the next five years.

Management, monitoring, firmware and software updates, diagnostics, device monitoring, crash analysis and reporting, security management, physical management, all these points are crucial for the long-lived "things," and the future solution must include tools capable of handling these issues in thousands today and millions of devices in a future. We look forward to breakthroughs in this area next year.

Until 2025 the development of the low-power, short-range networks will dominate wireless IoT connectivity will be the dominant branch compared to global IoT networks. In simple words, it means the starting of creating local "cells" of IoT. It will be similar to the preference of «the girl next door» over "playmate of the month."

The preference of "the girl next door" does not mean that we will forget about the "playmate of the month." The IoT networks' specific requirements are not complying with the existing cellular networks, which might be a problem. IoT needs wide-area covering, high-density connection, low bandwidth, long battery life, low costs. New protocols, narrowband IoT, elegant hardware solutions - this is the direction we need to move on next year, the place where big money lives.

Here is another fascinating and promising trend: developing, creating, and choosing IoT processors that must be not "overqualified" but powerful enough to comply with requests of the strong security and encryption, power consumption, to support an operating system, updatable firmware, and embedded device management. It is a sophisticated point requiring fundamental knowledge and outstanding engineering skills, but it is definitely exciting.

It does not need to tell that little, simple, slow, but the reliable processor does not need to use the WIndows, Linux, or iOS for its purposes. It only can't do it according to its specifications. It requires a simple, highly specialized operating system, ideally complying with the installed chips' tasks and capabilities. Thus, many of the IoT's operations systems have already been developed, and a lot of them will be developed in 2021.

Along with relatively slow applications, the Internet of Things supports high-speed streaming. Therefore, it was necessary to establish distributed streaming computing platforms that help millions of events per second. They not only can process very high rate data but also perform real-time analytics and pattern identifications. It is also a good gold-mine for 2021.

However, the need for ready-made solutions has led to the creation of the IoT platforms providing such services: Low-level device control and operations; IoT data acquisition, transformation, and management; IoT application development. Prediction tells that such platforms' need will go rising so you can dig in this cave too.

Like any other fast-developing system, IoT needs to get the new standards, protocols, associated application programming interfaces (API) to provide communications between various ecosystems, organizations, business systems. The demands for IoT Standards and Ecosystems will going rising and have to include the support of multiple standards or ecosystems and be prepared to update products during their life span. In this way, you can imagine the abilities that IoT is opening for the smart project manager and smart asses at all. Whatever branch of the industry you will choose, you will win if you start energetically, fast, and discreetly. There are many opportunities. Good luck!