The ‘Big Four’ technologies of the future are beginning to force themselves to the fore as companies start to dabble in the likes of Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT), as well as Big Data. However, as these four spring from their embryonic stages, issues and concerns are being heeded about their growth.
It is for this reason that many people and companies are starting to wonder if the problems cannot be solved by combining the technologies. Big Data, as a cornerstone component, can be useful when combined with of both AI and blockchain, but, perhaps the combination of IoT and blockchain can again help the advancement of these two technologies.
Blockchain has slowed in its adoption and growth, but its application is broad and comprehensive. Thus it can benefit, as well as help benefit, the likes of AI and IoT. However, Blockchain can also have a significant role to play in helping IoT along.
The growth of IoT is still moving along, but it too has slowed because many have realised that mastering this network of smart ‘things’ is far harder than they could have imagined. Issues of security and timelines of implementation have caused the hype around IoT to simmer down. In a similar vein, this has also happened in Blockchain.
It is because IoT and Blockchain find themselves in similar places when it comes to adoption that their combination may be able to help each other out and solve some of the significant concerns that have dogged them individually.
Right off the bat, it is clear that having a system of smart things performing as a network under limited human supervision could benefit from an immutable ledger because the security and safety concerns of the network can be shored up with the help of an un-hackable blockchain that has a well established token system.
There are of course many different ways in which these technologies can blend and function together that are already being explored and tested, but as a combination, their ultimate and strongest use case is probably still to be discovered - but it is out there.
Much like in the blockchain space, where ICOs were popping up with new chains to solve every conceivable problem or niggle in today’s world, IoT had its hype cycle a few years back. Many saw the IoT as a way to revolutionise every little aspect of a person’s life.
However, in the resulting few years, a lot was learned the hard way, especially when it came to roll out time and the security of a network of smart devices.
Deployment of IoT networks has come back with substantial failure rates. In a survey, it was shown that companies implementing an IoT initiative had only a 26 percent success rate. The problems slowing this success include some common issues that often dog new technologies, such as the quality of the data, the internal expertise, and the unexpected increased time to completion.
On paper, these IoT initiatives look promising and straightforward, but they are far more complicated to enact as it stands today. Additionally, when they are enacted, they are often subject to significant threats and security attacks. One example of this is, in late 2016, was when the world witnessed the sheer disruptive power of Mirai, a powerful botnet strain fuelled by Internet of Things devices like DVRs and IP cameras that were put online with factory-default passwords and other poor security settings.
This lack of security in the IoT sphere of things has been described as ‘a Doomsday Scenario waiting to happen’, by Yotam Gutman in the RFID Journal.
Imad Labbadi, CEO of VeCap, a company aiming at securing IoT enabled Smart Homes, goes on to explain the current issues with IoT security.
"There is Insufficient protection, several devices from well-known companies and other vendors have serious breaches in their security systems: insufficient encryption, weak authentication requirements - for example, auto-login, possibility of external connections via VPN.
