The simultaneous growth in the use of the Internet of Things and edge computing is interconnected, and future growth in both areas will be heavily driven by federal regulations to reduce emissions, the authors of a new report from Forrester Research say.
“We can’t separate IoT advancements without talking about the impact on the edge,” he said. “They are indistinguishable from each other…their impact on use cases is combined.”
According to Forrester’s “2022 Predictions: Edge, IoT, and Networks” report, demand for “sustainability-related services” will put IoT and the edge front and center. Environmental use cases such as monitoring CO2 levels, pollution and air quality will become increasingly popular, as will IoT systems that allow businesses to manage their resources more efficiently (think water and electricity usage).
Abhijit Sunil, the report’s lead author, said this is a major trend, especially among large companies.
“We surveyed Fortune 200 companies and as of 2020, 58% of them had a chief sustainability officer,” he said. “Most other organizations have some [other managers] in that role with an eye on sustainability.”
According to Sunil, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate IoT and edge technologies from the enterprise world’s sustainability strategy. Although there has been talk about how IoT and edge technologies will move technology out of the hands of IT and into the line of business, It’s still the CIO who is best placed to take action.
“How can anyone influence an organization’s green IT strategy without understanding these emerging technologies?” he said.
chip shortage
According to Forrester, the ongoing semiconductor shortage is unlikely to be resolved before mid-2023, meaning commercial and consumer IT products will suffer from price instability and availability issues in the coming months. Sunil said this is a particular problem for the IoT market because most of the silicon supply will be used to produce high-end CPUs and GPUs. Therefore, microcontrollers and sensors required for IoT devices will face more supply chain issues.
“If we think about what the Internet of Things is, systems that can communicate with each other, all of these things consist of some smart device that has a chip that supports those communications, storage or computation, so depending on the use case, there will be chip shortages The ripple effect affects all these markets,” he said.
5G or satellite?
Additionally, the report predicts that 5G’s dominance as a next-generation connectivity option, particularly in rural areas, may be overtaken by satellite connectivity. The long-term, expensive deployment of 5G opens the door to alternative WAN technologies. Low-orbit internet services like Starlink are “more promising than 5G” in rural areas, the report said.
Additionally, cable providers could start offering satellite internet as a backup service—even if they don’t offer wireless connectivity.
Large DDoS attack
Given the well-known security weaknesses of IoT, Forrester predicts that large-scale DDoS attacks driven by IoT botnets will destroy critical communications infrastructure. Noting the increasing scale of IoT botnet attacks – last summer mitigated an attack that hit 17 million requests per second, followed closely by an attack that hit 22 million requests per second – the report says IoT botnets will reach 30 million requests-per-second range in 2022, causing “economic pain” as it blocks critical communications for an extended period of time. Therefore, Forrester recommends that organizations revisit their DDoS preparedness.