The report is titled “Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies for Process Manufacturing: Global Markets” and it comes from analysts Research and Markets. The report signals increased overall spend – charting market growth from $750.4 million in 2017 to $2.7 billion by 2022 – and also significant growth in terms of hardware and software sales. While this is welcomed by many analysts, such growth raises security concerns.
For IoT hardware, the prediction is that this part of the market will grow from $314.3 million in 2017 to $1.0 billion by 2022 with a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent. Similarly, the software market will grow from $374.8 million in 2017 to $1.4 billion by 2022 with a compound annual growth rate of 31 percent.
The biggest growth will be seen with the oil and gas suppliers, food suppliers, metals, plastics and chemicals sectors. These areas of industry are most likely to be investing in hardware like sensors, programmable logic controllers and distributed control systems.
With software, the types involves of packages being purchased are IoT platforms, big data and security solutions. In addition, networking for wired or wireless configurations is also being bought up at an accelerating rate.
These link to the three pillars of IoT technology, as set out by IEEE Explore. The first is that transducers are needed to allow devices to interact with the environment and machines to convert stimuli to data and vice versa. The second is that local low-power computing is essential. The third is that low power communication links are necessary to transmit the data between IoT devices and local aggregators or cloud resources.
According to Forbes, this rise in IoT related technology brings with it challenges of security and scalability. There is also the issue of the eventual need to adhere “to open standards to facilitate large-scale monitoring of different systems.” This is to prevent connected devices, from different manufacturers, from being unable to communicate with each other.
This brings another security dimension, as reported by IoT Agenda, since open source software is prone to vulnerabilities. Such software code can harbor security vulnerabilities, especially given that more open source code is being developed and shared than ever before.
