IoT & Regulation: The Future of IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to disrupt and transform many industries. While IoT is still in its infancy, businesses are already experiencing improved operational efficiencies, productivity growth, cost reductions and new revenue generation opportunities. These gains are likely to increase and scale across the economy as IoT technological maturity and adoption increases.

Emerging technologies, such as IoT, can take ten or more years to reach market saturation from incubation. The US federal government stimulates this journey through targeted investments in research and development (R&D) and technology transfer as part of its Lab-to-Market process. In 2020, the US government invested $140 billion in a broad range of federally-funded R&D programmes, including emerging technologies. Approximately $50 billion of this total was directed towards nearly 300 government owned, government operated laboratories across the country. Some of these investments will likely yield extraordinary, long‐term, economic impacts when they are transferred to and used by industry. IoT is now ranked as strategically important by each of the major US federal agencies that focus on increasing competitiveness, economic prosperity, and national security. For IoT to realise its potential and achieve these benefits, a robust and secure technology infrastructure is required. This requires addressing two fundamental questions to ensure that resources are effectively allocated:

• Where are the technology infrastructure gaps that prevent IoT technologies from being more widely adopted?
• Where should the US federal government be directing resources and investments to close these gaps?

NIST Steps Up

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a non-regulatory agency within the US Department of Commerce. Its role is to promote technology innovation, competitiveness and the commercialisation of federally-sponsored research across all government agencies. NIST is central to the Lab-to-Market efforts, serving as the coordinator of the President’s Management Agenda Cross Agency Priority Goal 14 (Lab-to-Market) and co-chairing a National Science and Technology Council (NSTC).

NIST wants to better understand the current state of IoT research efforts.

_{Sethuraman Panchanathan, Director of National Science Foundation}

“Given the strategic importance of IoT, and in support of the Lab-to-Market initiative, NIST felt that it needed to better understand the current state of IoT research efforts,” says Sethuraman Panchanathan, Director of National Science Foundation and co-chair of NTSC’s Committee on Science and Technology Enterprise. To answer the two fundamental questions, he says, NIST has funded a research grant aimed at four key goals:

• To better understand the current state of IoT research efforts.
• To assess the top technology infrastructure gaps.
• To quantify the benefits of closing those gaps.
• To identify where future federal research investments should be made, whether it be in targeted research investments, stimulating private sector investment incentives, or other methods.

This new in-depth analysis is already helping NIST to address some of the pressing IoT-related challenges by becoming better informed about the necessary steps, future programmes, and the smart initiatives and investments which can support long-term economic outcomes.

A California-based company, Strategy of Things, was awarded the NIST grant to conduct this research study. The research team is examining IoT opportunities in ten key industries, which together represent a significant portion of the US economy:

• Agriculture•Construction
• Energy/Utilities
• Financial Services
• Healthcare
• Manufacturing
• Retail
• Public Sector
• Telecommunications
• Transport

Benson Chan, a senior partner at Strategy of Things, serves on the team of experts, assisted by a network of partners from government and the private sector, to ensure that the research project truly assists key leaders Chan argues that “IoT technologies bring enormous disruptive and beneficial impacts to national security, economic prosperity, human safety and well-being. But a number of technology infrastructure barriers stand in the way”. Because of this, he concludes that “while a number of established and start-up companies are developing IoT solutions, the federal government wants to work on the technology infrastructure gaps that industry is looking at. These include those that are not yet market ready, as well as those that no one company has the interest or resources to develop.”

The government wants to work on gaps in the technology infrastructure.

_{Benson Chansenior, Partner at Strategy of Things}

IoT’s Development Phases

While the research is ongoing and won’t be completed until early 2022, initial findings predict that the evolution of IoT will occur in four distinct phases (see Figure One). Each successive stage builds on the infrastructure, capabilities, solution maturity and market adoption of the previous one.

Today’s best-of-breed IoT applications are largely point solutions that address operational inefficiencies and productivity. As underlying technologies mature and as customer acceptance grows, future IoT applications are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. They are being tightly integrated with operations and information technology systems, and with each other. In short, these future IoT applications will become part of a larger, automated system of systems. The emerging solutions are focused on enabling fully-automated operations across industry ecosystems and they promise to yield transformative benefits that can only be envisioned today. The drivers of IoT evolution do differ at each stage of the evolutionary process. For instance, today’s IoT applications use a small number of sensors. The data collected from these sensors is aggregated and analysed largely through machine learning. IoT vendors expand the functionality and utility of their solutions by building and operating their own ecosystems to create an end-to-end system.

Figure 1: Initial findings from NIST predict that the evolution of IoT will occur in four distinct phases, each building on the infrastructure, capabilities, solution maturity and market adoption of the previous one. (source ©: Strategy of Things)

IoT evolution is being driven by technological advancements, interoperability across industries, government policies and regulations, and scale. Ten sensors in a factory today will soon become tens or hundreds of thousands.

In these upcoming systems of systems, machine learning will be replaced by ambient intelligence, where all devices can interact with each other autonomously and intelligently. With this integration, cybersecurity evolves to a broader concept of trust which encompasses not only the integrity of the data, the connections and the devices but also the decisions, the reliability and availability, and the equity of the outcomes.

To facilitate the future state of IoT, the research has identified some potential areas of technological research investment (see Figure Two). These were identified based on a study of the IoT accelerators shown in Figure One. While there is some research on these topics today, it is largely done independently in a few areas. A broader and more coordinated research agenda is required to accelerate the maturity and adoption of IoT within the US.

Figure 2: To enable the future state of IoT, research from NIST has highlighted a number of potential key areas for future technology research investment. (source ©: Strategy of Things)

IoT is a disruptive and transformational emerging technology. For it to realise its full potential, governments must understand the substantial economic, strategic and national security implications of IoT better. The significance of IoT’s development is too important to be left to organic evolution or to chance alone. The US federal government, through its R&D investments and policy development, needs to play a critical role in accelerating the maturity and adoption of IoT. The wide-ranging study process, as convened by NIST and as implemented by Strategy of Things, is already helping to bring key stakeholders together.

Next Steps

The next stage of this effort is being focused on offering a portfolio of opportunities for action. These moves can not only be taken by any one of a myriad of government agencies but also by a growing network of committed technology partners: private companies, universities, foundations, associations.

Read more articles