Is Your IoT Initiative Bringing Your Organization Chaos, or Have You Mastered Data Curation?

After a few thousand years of technological advancement, ranging from the invention of the horse-powered buggy to the innovation of the 10,000-horsepower top fuel dragster, humans have learned a thing or two about the process of technology adoption. For example, all technologies go through five stages of acceptance:

1. Awareness (people start realizing it’s a thing)
2. Assessment (people try to figure out what it can offer them)
3. Acceptance (people are recognizing its value)
4. Learning (people learn how to use it for their benefit)
5. Usage (the technology has now become mainstream)

During these steps, there is a chaotic phase—a point at which it’s not clear how this new innovation is going to change the world. For example, when radio stations first became popular, people swore it would kill the recording industry. Then, MTV came along, and everyone was convinced it would kill the music industry again. These things didn’t happen. The technology was simply in its chaotic phase.

Soon, a method for curating the new technology was developed, and these advancements assimilated quite nicely into the fabric of the world. We could examine the same process in the aviation industry, mobile devices, personal computers, the automobile, and most every other sector in the marketplace. The IoT is now in its chaotic stage, but it will soon be curated and assimilated into mainstream society. Here’s how it will work.

How Big Data Creates Chaos

The IoT is a hot buzzword causing no small stir at the moment—but it’s not actually that new or really that innovative. What it is currently is ‘not understood’.

For quite some time, devices have been in use to monitor, track, record, report, and measure all sorts of things—temperature, usage, pressure, humidity, time, stress points, efficiency, waste, etc. We use them on vehicles, industrial machinery, manufacturing equipment, HVAC units, utility meters, and much more. Connectivity is also not new. Since the invention of the telegraph, people (particularly business and the military) have been finding new ways to use long-distance and mass communications to their advantage.

The IoT simply merges these two technologies—now all of those devices can be constantly connected, delivering a virtually endless stream of data to their owners. It was the natural progression of these two technologies; inevitable, really.

Chaos is a Natural Part of the Process

The chaos comes in because, while we have the devices, and we have the connectivity, what we don’t yet have is:

• A clear picture of where all this will lead
• A database infrastructure to collect, hold, secure, process, and analyze this data for useful, practical intelligence

Will we all eventually be fitted with microchips, ushering in the era of Big Brother and the New World Order? Who will own and control the data? Will they use it for the common good, or to control the world? All of a sudden, the sci-fi of yesteryear seems more like a premonition than a fantasy.

More practically, how will businesses keep up with all of this data? According to one airline, one single flight in a Boeing 787 can produce as much as one-half terabyte of data. Most businesses simply aren’t prepared to handle this volume of data, especially with the security ramifications involved.

Curation is the Next Logical Step

As is most often the case, necessity is the mother of invention. Since it’s practically impossible to remain competitive today (in any industry) without data, businesses and their IT departments are finding ways to curate it to bring chaos under control and make use of the wild beast that has become the IoT and big data.

The most promising curation tool is the Data Lake. The Data Lake is virtually unlimited in scalability and flexibility, allowing businesses to store all types of data in all kinds of formats from all different sources—including the IoT. For a short time, you can learn how the Data Lake can help you curate big data from the IoT with this limited offer. Discover the first Full Metal Data Lake as a Service in the world. Get 1TB free for life - limited to 100 applicants. Start here.