Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing devices resulting from the proliferation of sensors and Internet-aware devices of every kind. This includes everything from cellphones, medical devices, home consumer electronics, wearable devices and almost anything else connected to the Internet that generates data. This also applies to components of machines, for example a jet engine of an airplane or the drill of an oil rig. The number of connected devices is growing exponentially, and IoT is best understood as the gigantic network of things and people.

The amount of data generated by these connected devices is unimaginably large, hence the closely connected concept of Big Data. Now that business data is no longer only collected from operational and transactional, internal systems, but also from physical devices like sensors and machines, this has repercussions on other technologies like data storage. The relational data warehouse was designed for highly structured data stored in tables, and cannot comprehend this kind of unstructured data, or this volume of data—hence, the rapid ascension Hadoop and of so-called “data lakes,” or vast repositories of raw data stored in its native format until needed.

Some IoT management platforms have started to emerge which manage these large data streams form start to finish and this category covers these management platforms.