What is the Internet of Things IOT?

The widespread use of internet in the world today, whether in individual or on the business scale has brought about multiple inventions and tools that help simplify life or tasks. With that emerged so many inventions accompanied with their terminology, hence, new terms and words appear. One of these is definitely the AI and the Internet of Things IOT. So what exactly is IOT and what are some of its popular examples?

What is the Internet of Things?

Internet of Things refers to a system of interconnected devices, digital or non-digital machines, or even people or animals, that are abled to share data among themselves. These things can be gadgets with built-in sensors, heart monitor implants or a car to alert the driver when a certain situation is involved.

In other words, the term IOT can involve anything connected to the internet which can transmit and receive data. It can gather data, analyze it and performs a specific action to help do a particular task or accomplish an assignment. Internet of Things help bring together multiple devices in a closed private internet connection, creating an atmosphere of internet secure private network.

How IoT works

The Internet of Things works as an ecosystem that combine internet-enabled smart gadgets and devices with embedded systems. These embedded programs can be pre-built-in processors, sensors and any hardware able to web-communicate, collect, and share data. IoT can use clouds or local hosts to gather, analyze and process data within a specific environment.

The most viable benefits of IoT is that it automates tasks, and enable devices to do the work without or with less human intervention.
Why IoT really matters?

With a broad tendency towards digital world, IoT is crucial for people to live and work in a smarter era, fully controlling individual and societal life. Besides offering an automation across people’ daily life, as smart homes, apps that monitor health and livelihood, it is also a much important to modern business. IoT enables businesses to analyze and watch the progress of the work systems in real-time, such insights which can be of ultimate significance for the development and growth of business sector.

Another aspect of IoT is that, while automating processes, it reduces labor costs and making it even more accurate and productive. It also improves the quality of service and service delivery, cutting down on the time of manufacturing and delivering goods, ad well as bringing down the waste. Not mentioning the transparency IoT creates in customer transactions.

IoT benefits for businesses

IoT brought about a wide range of benefits and opportunities to businesses and organizations. While some of these are industry-specific, the rest is applicable to various industries. The following are some of the subtle benefits of the Internet of Things for businesses:

• Enabling them to monitor their business processes
• Enhance the customer experience through automation
• Cut down on waste and help maintain environment
• Save a whole lot of time, money, and energy;
• Improve labor productivity;
• Provide a thorough insights into business progress;
• Help make wiser decisions;
• Enhance revenue;

IoT lay the necessiry toolsin the hands of business owners and CEOs to better approach their tasks and improve their work strategies and adopt new ones if needed.

In general, industries like manufacture, transportation, system-based services, and utility businesses that use sensors and other IoT gadgets, are in front of those which exploit IoT the most. But recently, other sectors like agriculture, infrastructure, and home industries, all have found a way to make use of IoT potentials to raise their products and services to the level of modern day’s scale, embracing the the digital transformation.

In agriculture, for instance, farmers can use sensors to gather vital data on soil, rainfall, humidity, and temperature which can help automate farming work and improve productivity while cutting down on time necessary to yield the same results.
The same goes over the rest of businesses in other industries, which are welling to embrace the new digital era, and which are eager to raise their business to another level.

Pros and Cons of IoT

While IoT can be loooked at as a new era of full potential for individuals and businesses alike, it brings with it its advantages and disadvantages, pretty much same like any new invention.

Pros of IoT

• Ability to monitor any task from anywhere at anytime and using any device;
• Save time and money by automating tasks that usually need human intervention;
• Enhance the quality and quantity of goods and services;
• Improve user experience for customer-based industries;
• Provinding a thorough insights into a specific business data;

Cons of IoT

While IoT has many advantages, it also lays many challenges. The following are some of the disadvantages of IoT technology:

• Raises the potential security attacks on systems: the wide use of interconnected devices with huge amout of data shared among them, makes it relatively easier for hackers to gain an authorized access ito the system;
• The overwelming of devices and tools connected to the same system may render the ability to control all of these a real challenge and in dire need for huge resources;
• Everything may come apart if there accurs any bug in the system;
• IoT lacks in an international communication between devices, which makes it impossible for businesses from around the world to communicate;