Steve Rogerson attends a webinar to find the problems encountered when deploying IoT worldwide.

The IoT is no longer small. Yes, there are still small applications that might cover a single building or specialised service, but these are becoming rarer as companies want to deploy IoT at scale, not just countrywide but worldwide.

That scalability brings with it a whole host of new problems, such as regulatory compliance, consistency, management, servicing and, of course, security. I was thus interested to listen to a recent webinar organised by the IoT M2M Council (www.bigmarker.com/horizon-house-publications/Designing-for-Massive-Worldwide-IoT-Deployment) that addressed this very problem.

Jason Dietrich, executive vice president at KORE (www.korewireless.com), said this quest for scalability was facing problems caused by a fragmented ecosystem with diverse networks, devices and providers that could make it difficult to deploy IoT at scale.

Marc Sauter, head of IoT product management at Vodafone (www.vodafone.com), agreed, saying there was much work to be done. There are different regulations in different countries that complicate matters when it comes to achieving reliable and consistent connectivity across countries and regions. Connectivity management must be seamless. It is hard to grow the number of devices and the volume of data they generate without compromising performance. On top of that, users need support and incidents need to be dealt with. All this requires planning.

Marco Bijvelds, vice president at Tata Communications (www.tatacommunications.com), said users though did not think about IoT as such but rather their particular use case, and it was thus important that IoT service providers look for ways to make things easier for them.

On this, all the panellists talked about the importance of users wanting just one point of contact. They don’t want to deal with multiple people to solve multiple problems and they don’t want to use multiple systems to control their deployment. They want one. This was referred to a couple of times during the panel as “single pane of glass”, and I was just thinking that really needs replacing. It has become one of those turn-off phrases that has suffered from overuse. But no sooner had I thought about it than Marc jumped in and referred to a “single throat to choke”. I smiled. It is a less common phrase, a bit more colourful, but has still been around for a while and has even more problems. Time to put our thinking caps on for this one.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the topic. All seemed to agree that companies shouldn’t try to do this alone. Jason said he believed in having a strong ecosystem of partners who understood use cases and goals. Marc said it was important to have a global partner with experience so mistakes were not repeated. And Marco called for consistent global support as that was what was important to many customers.

To provide such support for global deployment means companies are turning to AI and machine learning to answer customer questions and highlight issues before they become problems.

AI is everywhere, said Marco. AI combined with IoT – known as AIoT – is important to deal with the massive amounts of data being processed. He said there were plenty of use cases where AI could come in and help.

Jason agreed, singling out healthcare and smart cities as examples in which AI could be useful. And Marc said AI was all over the place and called for people to use it and experiment with it.

The more you scale, the more security needs to be considered as the larger the deployment, the larger the potential attack surface – more devices means more devices that can be hacked, wider connectivity means more places that communications can be intercepted.

You need to manage all this, said Jason. That is critical. You need the ability to monitor everything and look for anomalies across all your devices. You need to look for unusual communication patterns. And you need to consider how to update devices in the field.

Marco said one problem here was that security was often looked at in an isolated way rather than having complete end-to-end coverage. But he acknowledged this could be really complex to handle on a global scale.

So security, device management, regulations, support and more all increase in complexity when an IoT application or service grows to massive worldwide deployment. But the problems are not insurmountable and there are companies out there willing to take you by the hand, not the throat, and guide you through the maze. Take advantage of them.