ISA-95 is one of the best-known standards for industrial IoT (IIoT), but it's far from the only one. Instead, each standards body has created its own with the intent to provide more detailed implementation guides downstream. However, the standards organizations have made relatively little effort to harmonize the disparate architectures and frameworks.
How to deal with the lack of IoT standards
The implication for IoT professionals is that they must choose wisely. There's no one-size-fits all IoT framework and implementation roadmap, nor is one likely to emerge in the next year or two given the number of IoT standards bodies. An IT professional should start an IoT deployment with the consortium or standards body that fits his or her organization's needs and work closely with that group to provide feedback to that organization's standardization efforts.
The lack of common standards and platforms inhibits widespread, efficient IoT adoption. Different standards, connectivity patterns and stages of maturity heighten security risks with availability of multiple touch-points for hacking. Further, competing standards, vendor lock-in, proprietary devices and private networks make it hard for devices to share a common security protocol.Common standards by definition mean better security, whereas different standards, connectivity patterns and stages of maturity will allow IoT hackers to be successful.
There are two types of standards relevant for the aggregation process; technology standards (including network protocols, communication protocols, and data-aggregation standards) and regulatory standards (related to security and privacy of data, among other issues). Challenges facing the adoptions of standards within IoT are: standard for handling unstructured data, security and privacy issues in addition to regulatory standards for data markets.
Regulatory standards for data markets are missing especially for data brokers; they are companies that sell data collected from various sources. Even though data appear to be the currency of the IoT, there is a lack of transparency about; who gets access to data and how those data are used to develop products or services and sold to advertisers and third parties. There is a need for clear guidelines on the retention, use, and security of the data including metadata (the data that describe other data).
The internet of things (IoT) has seen tremendous growth over the past few years and shows no signs of slowing. Connected devices are a common sight in both homes and businesses, but as that happens, how these gadgets connect to each other becomes a more prominent concern. The IoT needs standards, which starts with learning why IoT standards matter in the first place.
IoT standardization has many benefits, so some may question why the industry has yet to achieve it. While part of it has to do with how young the sector is, implementing IoT standards can be more challenging than it appears initially.
Promoters of the (IoT) Internet of Things are no strangers to its possibility, knowing it has the strength to aid every feature of the human experience. With market reports, there are billions of people who are connected with these devices. And the industry verticals across the board embracing digital innovation. Moreover, it is crucial to establish IoT industry standards. The IoT is going to open up the prospects for coming four to five years from now. Business federations increasingly realize the importance of IoT in various sectors. The internet of things (IoT) is a series of internet-connected devices that can transmit and capture data over a network.
However, IoT does not come without any challenges and risks. While attention over data and security privacy continues to hike, the lack of IoT standards remains one of the considerable impediments. The rising amount of proprietary, legacy, and single-vendor solutions causes problems with disparate systems, data silos, and security gaps. There are some Free Coding Bootcamps available in the market from which you get more knowledge about this IoT standardization.
Some organizations have already found ways to deal with the most famous IoT-targeted malware. For instance, an FBI agent shared how the agency stopped the Mirai botnet attacks, and Microsoft has released a guide on how to proactively defend your systems against the Mozi IoT botnet.
However, the lack of standardization in IoT sensors, coupled with interoperability challenges, has made them a prime vector for cyber attacks and are barriers for ubiquitous use of these sensors in many applications. Cyber attacks are targeting IoT sensors in greater numbers, in more industries, and with greater sophistication than ever before. Interoperability challenges reduce the ability to access these sensors and the data they publish to make useful and timely decisions.
The power and energy sector is another area that could significantly benefit from standards and educational initiatives for sensor cybersecurity and interoperability, because sensor usage to determine when and where to efficiently distribute power is widespread within this sector.
Technology standards that work with current and emerging technologies provide a fundamental framework for system-level integration and cybersecurity. IEEE SA has a growing portfolio of standards and projects that address different aspects of IoT sensors. Here are a few examples:
Gartner forecasts that 15 billion connected things will be in use by 2021, opening up opportunities for increased efficiencies and innovation across industries. Yet, lack of IoT security standards and outdated processes such as shipping with default password credentials and manual onboarding leave devices, and the networks they operate on, open to large-scale attacks.
The obvious solution was to create open systems where data could be exchanged according to set standards. No system would be proprietary. That ideal was simply too expensive. Decades of investment went into creating those legacy systems, and data integrity had to be preserved. No single standard exists for data exchange; however, a set of standards has emerged. This unofficial set of standards means that financial institutions only need to support a limited number of protocols to connect with the majority of devices. Manufacturing is facing similar problems as it tries to merge legacy systems with new technology.
Unfortunately, no simple solution exists for the challenges facing manufacturers. No one has a crystal ball to know what technologies will dominate in the future. Part of the difficulty rests with the number of possible protocols and the layers through which data must flow. A secondary problem is the lack of consensus among the technical community as to the best way to approach the problem. Most technology vendors are biased towards their solution, so how do manufacturers decide?
Adherence to these ISO standards is voluntary, although acceptance of the OCF specifications is increasing. Approximately 400 companies belong to the foundation, including companies such as Samsung, Microsoft, and Cisco. Whether the industry goes with the OCF standards or another set of standards, manufacturers should push for an open standard of interoperability. Adhering to a standard means that devices can be added to a network faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. It also means organizations can realize:
Technological standards in most areas are still fragmented. These technologies need to be converged. Which would help us in establishing a common framework and the standard for the IoT devices. As the standardization process is still lacking, interoperability of IoT with legacy devices should be considered critical. This lack of interoperability is preventing us to move towards the vision of truly connected everyday interoperable smart objects. For IoT devices to be truly useful, they must be able to communicate with each other and work together seamlessly. This requires standardization in the way that these devices communicate, as well as the development of common protocols and APIs.
Not surprisingly, big vendors like AmazonFootnote 1(AWS IoT), CiscoFootnote 2 (Jasper), IBMFootnote 3 (Watson), AppleFootnote 4 (HomeKit), GoogleFootnote 5 (Brillo), MicrosoftFootnote 6 (Azure IoT), and QualcommFootnote 7 (AllJoyn) have rapidly proliferated in the IoT market in the last few years. Besides, the European project Unify-IoT [6], lately identified that there are more than 300 IoT platforms in the current market, and more to come. Each of these platforms promotes its own IoT infrastructure, proprietary protocols and interfaces, incompatible standards, formats, and semantics which creates closed ecosystems (sometimes called stove pipes or silos). Nevertheless, the necessity for these different solutions to seamlessly work together, i.e. IoT interoperability, is growing. A new McKinsey analysis [7] points out a substantial threat to the predicted economic value: missing interoperability. Particularly, the authors state that 40% of the potential benefits of IoT can be obtained with the interoperability between IoT systems.
In the absence of a de-facto communication standard(s), not all smart devices implement all these communication technologies. In some cases, the devices that want to exchange information may be using different communication technologies which requires interoperability between the different types of heterogeneous devices that co-exist in the IoT ecosystem. Device interoperability refers to enabling the integration and interoperability of such heterogenous devices with various communication protocols and standards supported by heterogeneous IoT devices. Device interoperability is concerned with (i) the exchange of information between heterogeneous devices and heterogenous communication protocols and (ii) the ability to integrate new devices into any IoT platform. 2ff7e9595c
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