Three IoT Predictions for 2018: Fog Computing, Security, and Smarter Decisions
As companies shift to digital systems on the factory floor the first step is often preventive maintenance. In previous years, highly experienced factory hands would go around and listen to the motors and drives. They could hear the health of the machines. They could smell it. Those folks are retiring, and they’re being replaced with sensors and alarms tied into IoT systems.
This is changing the nature of the factory floor, said Saar Yoskovitz, CEO ofAugury, a preventive maintenance company. He offers three predictions for manufacturing facilities during the coming year. For one, he sees a big future in fog computing as floods of data choke cloud storage and processing. He sees growth in the awareness of security and risk. Finally, he expects facility managers will make smarter decisions as they process greater data from their machines.
One of the changes Yoskovitz has recently observed in the manufacturing market is that smaller companies are now implementing predictive maintenance. “Predictive maintenance has been done for more than 30 years, but it’s been in the high-end market,” Yoskovitz told Design News. “We bring predictive maintenance to all markets. We attach sensors to chillers, auxiliary equipment, pumps, compression and send it to the cloud for analysis. Then we tell the user when something is wrong and what needs to be done to fix the machine.”
1.) Fog and Cloud Computing Will Bring Light to Manufacturing Facilities
According to Yoskovitz, the future of the industrial IoT will be a combination of cloud and fog computing: a hybrid solution where some computing happens on the edge – on the devices in the field (or fog computing) – and some computing happens in the cloud. Sensors will collect data from machines and monitor it for system health. The data will then be analyzed to determine options for improvement as well as predicting potential problems – before they happen.
The idea behind fog computing is that not all digital decisions and alarms need to go up to the cloud for analysis. “When you keep the algorithm at the machine level, you only send data to the cloud for updates. You don’t send all of it to the cloud,” said Yoskovitz. “You want the machine to respond quickly. Also, with fog computing, you can still work, since you don’t need the cloud to keep on working. How do the two systems – cloud and fog – work together? The analogy is that you bring the cloud down to the asset.”
2.) Awareness of Security and Risk Will Grow
With greater connectivity, you increase the risk, since you’re adding additional points of contact.
