8 tried and true method I have seen, witness, or fixed for customers, partners, or vendors attempting to get into the IoT business.

1. There are now over 500 Internet of Things, M2M, edge computing, and fog computing companies, infrastructure
providers, service providers, integrators, and “partners”. The litany of choices of IoT components and
architectures leads to millions of combinations of less than interoperable parts and pieces. Yet, the IoT hype
cycle as with other hype cycles led to this conglomeration of protocols, boxes, clouds, and paradigms. It’s a ripe
time to start and IoT company.
There are many paths to failure and few paths to success in the IoT business as with any other business.
8 exciting ways to fail in the IoT business:
1. Jumping right in.
2. Focusing on the technology.
3. Who owns the data.
4. Security as an afterthought.
5. I don’t buy this IoT hype.
6. Locking yourself in.
7. Forgetting about 5 years from now.
8. The hidden cost of IoT.
The Internet of Things
Pathways to Failure or Success
Perry Lea
CEO/Founder Computational Vision

2. 1. Jumping right in
Often is the case that a company or a technology starts with a clever
technologist or engineer. Today we have democratized “things”.
Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, and 3D printing have revolutionized the
maker movement. Not anyone can build a prototype, gadget, or
tinker in the classroom. That is great, but such devices rarely nor
effectively make enterprise or industrial grade componentry. Think
about the issues of scaling a small development kit in an industrial or
even commercial appliance beyond 1000 customers. You need to
think about scaling into the millions from the start.
Think about enterprise grade security, remote firmware upgrades, IT requirements, OT usability, certificate
management, even device management. Is that your company forte?
2. Focusing on the technology
The Consumer Electronics Show of 2018 in Las Vegas was certainly a hotbed for anything labelled IoT or machine
learning. That hype meant things that probably have no utility being connected – became connected. I saw
many smart objects that all required some degree of IT maintenance and management that the customer just
bought into. If you are embarking on an IoT venture from a hobbyist perspective, think about how to monetize
your device. Is it truly a solution? Is it a solution for exclusively yourself or a small community? How do you
plan to scale? Remember the value in IoT is not simply connecting one object but thousands or millions.
Run your idea past a business developer.
3. Who owns the data
In 2010 the world IT generated 1.2 zettabytes of data. In 2015 that grew to 8.5 zettabytes. By 2020 the estimates
lead to 44 zettabytes. Where does all that data go? A lot stays on the edge, but a significant amount is sent to
the cloud. If you are an IoT provisioner, customer, or integrator – who do you think owns that data? Is that the
source of data – the customer? Is storage a service and the provisioner makes the claim?
Companies realize data is the new oil and even if there
isn’t immediate value, maybe someday there will be
significant value. Telematic data is invaluable to
insurance companies. Real-time health information
could be significantly useful to big pharma and health
providers.
Recently a company that tracks runners, joggers, and
cyclists through a fitness app that inadvertently allowed
anyone to see an individual path. This revealed hidden
US military bases as joggers ran around the perimeter.
Who owns this data? What responsibilities do you have

3. with that information? How long do you intend to retain it? Are you considering selling it?
Understand your data retention and ownership policy and goals. Understand the future value of data but also
the liability of data owner ship.
4. Security as an afterthought
At this point we shouldn’t have to inform anyone reading this of the importance of
security anywhere. The IoT is literally the perfect blend of loosely coupled links on
a chain of technologies and protocols. The traditional PC and datacenter market
has spent the last 40 years battling and addressing security from late 80 viruses and
worms infecting the fledgling Internet to the 90’s battles resolving ROP and stack
overflow bugs in desktop operating systems.
The IoT eco-verse is a collection of significantly resource and power constrained
electronics all enjoying a free ride on the Internet. Add to that a myriad of near-
range and wide area networks, mesh, edge processing, and the fact that these devices are in remote areas open
to the public – leads to a disaster in the making.
If you don’t invest and design security in as part of your IoT deployment, you mind as well not deploy. It takes
an investment to ensure a system doesn’t turn into a lawsuit or an embarrassment. Security can either be a
company’s embarrassment or the white lining.
Involve IT upfront. Plan for field upgrades in the most remote locations or in moving systems. Perform routine
audits of the design. Do not dismiss modern secure computing standards like Trusted Platform Modules, Secure
OS, Root of Trust, PKI, and certificate management. Have a plan when the attack occurs.
5. Not buying the hype
A different issue is also plaguing industries just now considering the value of IoT to augment, grow, or reduce
OPEX for their business. This article is not a manifesto of the efficacy of innovation nor an “embracing change”
self-help guide. That said, many industries that are slow to adapt miss a critical window. Industrial and
enterprise IoT devices that find true customer value and ROI can strip their competitors out of a market and
keep them out for a long time. Take infrastructure for example like smart parking structures, lighting projects,
and industrial sensors. Those industries have buy cycles that can last a dozen years or more before revisiting a
new vendor.
By the time you realize you need to invest can quite possibly be too late. You lost the runway needed to take on
the competition. And the competition may come from least likely spaces.
6. Locking yourself in

4. Last year it was reported the 17% of those 500 IoT providers, vendors, and integrators were either acquired or
merged into other companies. The IoT world changes on a daily basis and with so many standards proliferating,
that is bound to happen.
If you start an IoT business without considering the scale, regional effects, and business model in the future you
are bound to create needless work. Settling on a particular cloud vendor or wireless protocol/SLA may be good
in the West coast of the US, but may not scale if your product enters the European market. What if you cloud
provider suddenly became a significant cost center for your business? How easy would it be to migrate your
cloud based analytics services and OT management plane to a better vendor?
Also consider availability of supply especially in brownfield industries like industrial IoT. You may need a
particular vendor around in 10 years.
Always have a contingency and plan for scale/longevity from the start. Always consider standards better than
point solutions. Standards like IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, and MQTT have longevity.
7. Forgetting about 5 years from now
There are so many components to IoT and fog computing. These stretch from sensors and energy harvesters,
edge gateways, fog nodes, backhaul infrastructure, cloud providers, data lakes, inference engines, streaming
ingestors, complex event processing analytic engines, software defined perimeters, certificate authorities,
various near range ISM band signals, 5G LTE fabrics, and so on. What will that list look like in 5 years? That list
wasn’t the same list 5 years ago (we can be sure of that).

5. Will your vendors be around? Who provides security updates in 5 years? Will you carrier be uneconomical to
use? How do you change an IoT topology when it scales to a million nodes in moving vehicles 5 years from now?
Plane to scale from 1 IoT sensor node to 1 million as a thought model. Then look at every component in the
chain, which one breaks first? Again have a contingency plan.
8. The hidden cost of IoT
Finally the cost center. This stuff costs money – and not in obvious ways. An IoT solution can vary differently
from one provider to another and you the customer or partner needs to be cognizant of a corporations
underlying motives. Again, data is the new oil. Every byte of data retains longevity of value any time it’s
transmitted, archived, or processed. To get a single byte of data from a sensor to a cloud data lake may have
trivial or even no operational expense. However, when we scale to millions of nodes and significant data, the
charges start increasing exponentially.
There are other cost centers as well. For example, the maintenance and power of your devices at the edge.
Energy isn’t free either, and every pico-Joule consumed sampling and transmitting a byte of data costs. Again,
scale is important. For example, an Industrial IoT use case that uses 100 battery based sensor nodes to monitor
factory equipment can result in over $200,000 in charges in battery replacement, servicing, equipment
downtime, and material costs over 2 to 3 years.
Consider costs and the value of data. Consider edge processing and fog computing as a means to control, filter,
and denature data before it hits a wire.
Conclusions
IoT and edge computing provide significantly value, OPEX savings, and utility. The challenge is effectively
architecting a solution that scales, secures, at the right time in the right place. The myriad of technologies can
seem overwhelming, but a solid technologist and architect should be able to design and build such a solution at
enterprise scale.
If Perry has piqued your interest in IoT, edge computing, and how to build a system at
enterprise/industrial scale from sensor to the cloud, his book Internet of Things for
Architects from Packt Publishing is a must read and reference.