Connectivity outages and the effects of service disruptions in the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape

Connectivity outages and the effects of service disruptions in the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape

In the rapidly evolving world of the Internet of Things (IoT), businesses are seizing the opportunity to generate new revenue streams through innovative solutions and services. With an estimated 20.8 billion devices expected to be connected to the Internet by 2020, up from 4.9 billion in 2015, the potential for growth is immense. However, ensuring the reliability and trust of these services is crucial to their success.

Financial loss is a significant threat for organizations unable to guarantee service availability, with enterprise-sized organizations losing an average of $16 million annually due to downtime. Moreover, failure to recover data in a timely manner in the IoT era can be inconvenient and potentially fatal. As IoT continues to transform industries, ensuring availability is built into the planning of these deployments is essential.

Businesses can provide always-on IoT access that drives improved reliability and stronger consumer trust by implementing a combination of advanced connectivity solutions, robust communication protocols, and resilient cloud architectures.

Key strategies include:

1. Implement Reliable Communication Protocols: Use protocols like MQTT with Quality of Service (QoS) levels to guarantee message delivery even under poor network conditions, and employ retained messages for continuity. Prioritize security with TLS/SSL encryption and ensure interoperability by adhering to standards such as IEEE 802.15.4 or Zigbee.
2. Adopt Seamless Connectivity Solutions: Employ approaches such as Connectivity-as-a-Service (CaaS), which continuously monitors and manages connectivity across multiple networks (Wi-Fi, cellular, satellite). This allows automatic switching between networks without session disruption, ensuring devices remain online no matter location or network changes.
3. Design IoT Systems for Intermittent Connectivity: Firmware should handle connection loss gracefully with techniques like exponential backoff and randomized scheduled activities to prevent traffic spikes. Cloud applications must scale horizontally and tolerate devices frequently going offline and online, maintaining data coherence and capacity during peak loads.
4. Maintain Accurate Time Synchronization and Device Security: Ensure IoT devices have reliable internal clocks to validate security certificates, which is critical for secure communications and data integrity.
5. Continuous Testing and Monitoring: Deploy automated and real-world condition testing to catch issues early, including testing under poor network scenarios. Conduct penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, and firmware update tests to maintain security and reliability.
6. Build Digital Trust: Establish digital trust by ensuring the IoT services are safe, secure, and reliable. This involves transparent communication about data handling and strong security practices to nurture consumer confidence.

Recent incidents, such as a server outage that affected about 10% of PetNet's user base, causing their automatic pet feeder system to malfunction and leaving many animals without food, underscore the importance of these strategies. Service levels for IoT must be reliable, with 24.7.365 availability to prevent hampering the sector's progress.

In the modern data centre, the 3-2-1 rule (keeping 3 different copies of data, on 2 different media, with 1 of those locations off-site) is often used to protect data. The importance of having a disaster recovery and backup solution in place for businesses adopting IoT has been highlighted. Data protection is crucial in the IoT era, requiring near-continuous data protection, verification, and encryption.

As the healthcare sector uses IoT to track health information such as foetal heartbeats and blood glucose levels, ensuring that a service meets customer expectations for data availability becomes the biggest challenge. Forward-thinking businesses are incorporating availability into their data centre strategies and modernisation plans.

While organizations have increased service level requirements to minimize downtime and guarantee data access, many still make costly errors. Veeam research shows that poor service and connectivity can discourage consumers from paying for and trusting connected 'things'. By integrating these practices—robust protocols, smart connectivity management, resilient device and cloud design, comprehensive testing, and security—businesses can provide always-on IoT access that drives improved reliability and stronger consumer trust.

[1] IEEE 802.15.4 [2] Connectivity-as-a-Service (CaaS) [3] Exponential Backoff [4] Building Digital Trust [5] Veeam Research

1. To ensure continuous IoT access and inspire consumer trust, businesses can adopt data-and-cloud-computing strategies that include implementing reliable communication protocols such as IEEE 802.15.4, embracing Connectivity-as-a-Service (CaaS), and firmware designs using exponential backoff.
2. As data security becomes more critical in the IoT era, businesses should prioritize building digital trust through solutions like Veeam Research, which reveals the importance of near-continuous data protection, verification, and encryption, as well as proactive testing to maintain service quality and discourage consumer distrust.

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