ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Ammar Enaya, Regional Director – Middle East and Turkey at Aruba.
educating clients about the potential
added values they can have with IoT-
driven trends and integrated solutions.
These new partnerships are taking the
IT industry to the next level of successful
‘smart’ projects and initiatives, such as
smart cities, smart parking, smart grids,
smart watering and so on.”
All well and good, but those wishing
to bring their IoT product to market
do face hurdles which, although
not insurmountable, need careful
consideration, such as interoperability,
security and data management. According
to Luis Ortega, “Implementing an
IoT-driven strategy poses challenges
to Middle Eastern companies. As an
ERP player, we think the key challenge
is not only data management, but also
leveraging all this new data to enable
businesses to optimise their processes
and systems for the overall operations.”
Mohammad Jamal Tabbara added:
“The complexity of implementing and
maintaining a scalable and secure
interoperable IoT ecosystem is not
making it easy for IoT vendors. Yet the
Implementing
an IoT-driven
strategy poses
challenges to
Middle Eastern
companies.
Luis Ortega, Managing
Director for Middle East,
Africa, South Asia at IFS
opportunities and the revenues behind
this market are what make these vendors
invest and stay with the trend. IoT devices
need to be connected and, to do this,
they need essential and core network
services, along with interoperability of the
underlying technologies, such as reachable
IP addresses as a start, along with highly
available secure DNS & DHCP services.”
Alongside these hurdles, there is
also the cost of implementation and
maintenance to add into the mix.
However, the biggest hurdle to IoT
adoption is security. Aruba’s study – The
Internet of Things: Today and Tomorrow
– found that 84 per cent of organisations
had experienced an IoT-related security
breach. More than half of respondents
declared that external attacks were a key
barrier to embracing and adopting an IoT
strategy. This confirms that a holistic IoT
security strategy, built on strong network
access control and policy management,
will not only protect enterprises but also
simplify the security approach for IT.
The ability to capture and effectively
use data is described by Kevin Ashton as
“what defines the Internet of Things”, but
this appears to be another clear challenge
for global organisations. While nearly
all (98 per cent) organisations that have
adopted IoT claim they can analyse data,
almost all respondents (97 per cent) feel
there are challenges to creating value
from this data. Well over a third (39 per
cent) of businesses are not extracting or
analysing data within corporate networks
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