Building Skills for IoT

#Discussion(Startup) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

It is no great surprise to see that IT security tops the list of skills that companies view as critical to IoT success. Merging the digital and physical worlds opens a host of potential security issues. This topic is explored further in the next section.

The next set of skills are certainly familiar to IT professionals, though there may be varying degrees of proficiency. Data management and analysis are key to unlocking the potential of IoT, but companies may need to start with basic data fundamentals if disciplined data practices are not in place. Networking and device support skills are a given in most IT departments, but companies are still looking for improvement around devices, since those are the “things” in these new systems.

The low ranking of cloud computing and artificial intelligence shows that companies may not yet appreciate how different trends complement each other. Some IoT implementations might be small, but more often they are large-scale projects. Such scale exceeds the the capacity of most on-premises infrastructure, and the ongoing management and analysis requires some amount of automation. Cloud computing and AI will be necessary ingredients of any broad IoT initiative.

Hardware and software are not the only resources that need to be expanded for IoT. In order to fill the many different skill gaps, companies expect to utilize a wide variety of professionals and partners.

Overall, the tendency to focus on “IoT-specific” is reflected in the types of resources that businesses expect to utilize. Three of the top four resources on the list are new IoT-specific technical staff (cited by 44% of companies), new IoT-specific vendors (38%) and new IoT-specific solution providers (38%). However, these options may be more applicable in the long-term, as robust plans are developed and these types of resources become more widely available.

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