1. Science / Technology

Implementing IoT Technology into Your Business: Benefits and Obstacles

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The Internet of Things is becoming an integral part of many businesses from different spheres. Here we explore the benefits and obstacles of implementing IoT technology into your business. Take a look!

IoT technology

In recent times, a buzzword and a recurrent point of discussion have been the Internet of Things (IoT), along with its continuous progress, benefits, and enchantments.

To address the elephant in the room, by ‘things,’ we mean devices in this context, and IoT is a system that blends the physical and the digital world blurring the divide between the two. That means that it can do so without the need for human-to-human or human-to-computer communication. Some day-to-day examples would be a person wearing a fitness tracker (such as a Fitbit), voice assistants (such as Siri), smart appliances (such as iRobot), or even a car with built-in sensing devices that inform the driver when the fuel pointer is not on the good side of the semi-circle anymore.

The best is yet to come, and for that reason, we’ve even included it in the 7 Technology Trends That Will Mark 2022. Don’t get the wrong idea! The notion of automated collaboration of millions of different appliances inside a global network has been around for almost three decades; nonetheless, its fast growth began fairly recently. Ignoring digital transformation may have negative repercussions and firms know that failing to embrace IoT quickly will most likely mean that they’ll stutter behind tech-savvy rivals.

Let’s Go Over The Benefits

Insights from rich data

Nowadays, we live in a data-driven world. Because of this, it makes sense that those companies which are fully aware of their customers’ behavior are also the ones who are most likely to provide the particular services, promotions, and products that their customers yearn for.

Putting this into practice, let’s consider the telematics boxes that track the driving pattern of car drivers. This system tracks the customer’s driving behavior and informs insurance companies if the driver in question is driving safely and within certain given guidelines. This allows the same insurance to decrease the driver’s premium so long that such behavior is repeated.

IoT technology offers businesses a lot of insights in addition to less downtime, increasing the ability to more efficiently plan and schedule inventory levels. Moreover, those firms implementing IoT would be able to track loss as well as increase supply chains correspondingly together with improving the customers’ experience, which brings us to the next point.

Improved Customer Experience

The Internet of Things is critical to delivering a pleasant client experience, primarily by continuously monitoring equipment and systems. IoT sensors may be able to predict issues before they actually happen, notify engineers and alert them to the problem so that it can be fixed before any downtime occurs.

An automatic system suggests various solutions to difficulties, allowing a business to tackle the situation as rapidly as feasible, sometimes even before the customer contacts the support team.

… and Efficiency Too!

Being at the frontline of digital transformation, Amazon launched the Amazon Dash Replacement, providing relevant businesses with the ability to find out when clients require replacements and automatically dispatch them before they run out. That is efficiency!

Improving the Level of Precision

IoT technology

By default, technology is expected to improve precision and ease repetitive processes. Those same activities would therefore become automated and take much less time to be carried out. Automatically, this helps in optimizing the business’ potential since costs are lowered and operations are simplified. This leads to an increased ability to offer a wider range of products and/or services and even perhaps improve their quality at the same cost. That sounds like a huge step up the competition game for any firm, naturally empowering businesses to take up more demanding, difficult, or time-consuming tasks.

Enhanced Management and Effective Decision Making

IoT applications help monitor and track different kinds[FR2]  of business operations and strategies. This data can be vital for an effective decision-making process. Taking the simple employees’ badges and working equipment as a prime example – embedding these with IoT sensors allows offices to be updated up to the minute about various aspects within the business. Individuals in charge of decision-making can freely look at this data and use it as an ongoing base while monitoring how certain changes can have an influence on the direction in which the business is heading towards. As already implied, they could make smarter and wiser decisions based on real-life data when needed.

At Hexacta, we had already understood the importance of such implementation back in 2013 when we kicked off an initiative that saw us transforming to a Smart Office. These past nine years have further proved to us that data assembly, along with analysis, reveals a tonne of new prospects and opportunities that will help any business grow exponentially.

Bumps Faced Along The Way

Security Issues

Data security may be the biggest issue when implementing an IoT system since most of the data collected is sensitive and personal. This naturally suggests that such data must be safeguarded from any access that’s unauthorized. 

There are various ways to tackle this and protect the data. Firstly, a company should only allow devices to gather data on a particular defined ground. When it comes to sharing the data, it’s imperative that this is transmitted only with exclusively authorized users, defined according to their access level.

IoT technology

It is suggested that privacy policies are clearly defined in line with developed tools and applications that adhere to them. This way, protective measures could be imposed. This course of action could take place in the form of a network security system which would comprise intrusion prevention and firewall systems, internet intelligence for the cloud, as well as web security practices.

Apart from that, IoT security can entail the safeguarding of network interactions and software applications, plus the safety of devices.

Besides, the consumers’ perception of security in IoT should be addressed. If not, the customers’ trust in the company might be harmed, and that would be the cause of IoT not reaching its full potential.

Storage Space

It’s a fact that more data requires more storage space, and for larger firms, this can be quite substantial. This is where analytics platforms come in to solve this problem, with their sole job being to gather, organize, and inspect streams of data. Implementing this soon enough would prevent storage issues from potentially arising.

Training the Employees

We’ll go deeper about this in a minute, but for now, let’s just consider the costs associated with training the employees as a minor bump in the road. New technology calls for learning new skills, which makes this a vital step in digital transformation. Such costs would greatly depend on the number of employees needed to undergo the training and the complexity of the technology being used.

How can the implementation of an IoT Ecosystem be Successful?

Staff training

Employees must be educated and well informed about the IoT shift for a successful transition. Needless to say, the hiring process would also need to reflect this technology shift, as do the candidates considered, in which case, a good knowledge of technology needs to be in place.

A Good Investment in IoT Devices

Having a booming IoT ecosystem is also based on the investment done initially on the recommended technology. This would involve any devices and the software that is necessary too. This might sound costly at first, but rest assured that the costs are outdone by the return on investment. Besides, since there are several new products that are IoT-enabled already being developed, prices are more likely to fall.

The Verdict

Organizations in a range of sectors are increasingly seeing the benefits and utilizing IoT to run more effectively, provide superior customer service, enhance decision-making, and raise the business’s overall value. One couldn’t hide the fact that in spite of all the opportunities IoT brings with it, there are still a few downsides that follow. They could be security issues or incompatibility challenges faced when integrating IoT devices together. However, by being proactive and working with the right specialists, these challenges can be easily pushed to the side thanks to crafted solutions that wipe away restrictions impeding the digital transformation.

One thing seems certain: despite existing hurdles, the Internet of Things is simply magnificent and will continue to infiltrate our lifestyles, from the office to individual leisure pursuits. Avoid falling behind and take advantage of the benefits such a technological development can bring to any business.

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