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IoT: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?

Sven Hammar

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly present in our daily lives, at work, in the home and in the public sphere, making the world a more connected place. In fact, 2020 will see at least 20 billion connected devices across the globe.

So, let's take a look at the most common iterations of the IoT at the moment, and what we can expect to see in the IoT landscape over the next 5 years.

How IoT looks now

 
In Our Homes
Many people's first experience of the IoT comes from their domestic life. There are hundreds of connected devices available to buy without breaking the household budget, from Google's Assistant software to smart "Nest" thermostats. People can use their voices to control their surroundings, making their homes and lives more connected than ever before. Smart homes also give us extra peace of mind, as IoT-enabled tech can connect owners to their home at all times.

On Our Wrists
Thanks to wearable technology, more people are starting to carry IoT capability around with them. Smartwatches like the Apple Watch mean our wrists are now synched with mobile devices and associated services. Additionally, the proliferation of wearable fitness trackers such as Fitbit, which provide instant data about users' workouts, has changed the face of the wider fitness space.

The world of work is changing to accommodate wearable IoT devices too. Employers are now introducing wearables into the office and onsite workplaces, allowing remote information sharing and optimization of employee processes.

What can we expect over the next five years?

In Our Cities
As IoT tech is adopted within the home, we'll also begin to see its application in wider urban neighborhoods, towns and cities. "Smart cities" will streamline services and improve infrastructure – provided they have the right connections and data. Issues like traffic congestion and pollution are among the problems the IoT can solve when smart technology is built into a city. Early schemes are already at work in Barcelona and Southampton, UK – other cities are sure to follow suit with innovative and smart technology over the next few years.

On Our Roads
Most high-end cars being sold today already have a high degree of connectivity, and the automotive industry is not going to slow down in delivering optimal user experience and embracing the IoT. Car manufacturers over the next five years will drive a revolution in how people both buy and use their vehicles. Increased accessibility will mean you can adjust car temperature, check mileage, or even start the ignition from an app. Also, with more control over cars at all times, users will benefit from better security.

The IoT is transforming every day physical objects like phones, watches and cars and creating an ecosystem of information that will enrich our lives. As more and more things enter into the digital fold, the IoT is en route to becoming the defining disruptive technology of our time.

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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IoT: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?

Sven Hammar

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly present in our daily lives, at work, in the home and in the public sphere, making the world a more connected place. In fact, 2020 will see at least 20 billion connected devices across the globe.

So, let's take a look at the most common iterations of the IoT at the moment, and what we can expect to see in the IoT landscape over the next 5 years.

How IoT looks now

 
In Our Homes
Many people's first experience of the IoT comes from their domestic life. There are hundreds of connected devices available to buy without breaking the household budget, from Google's Assistant software to smart "Nest" thermostats. People can use their voices to control their surroundings, making their homes and lives more connected than ever before. Smart homes also give us extra peace of mind, as IoT-enabled tech can connect owners to their home at all times.

On Our Wrists
Thanks to wearable technology, more people are starting to carry IoT capability around with them. Smartwatches like the Apple Watch mean our wrists are now synched with mobile devices and associated services. Additionally, the proliferation of wearable fitness trackers such as Fitbit, which provide instant data about users' workouts, has changed the face of the wider fitness space.

The world of work is changing to accommodate wearable IoT devices too. Employers are now introducing wearables into the office and onsite workplaces, allowing remote information sharing and optimization of employee processes.

What can we expect over the next five years?

In Our Cities
As IoT tech is adopted within the home, we'll also begin to see its application in wider urban neighborhoods, towns and cities. "Smart cities" will streamline services and improve infrastructure – provided they have the right connections and data. Issues like traffic congestion and pollution are among the problems the IoT can solve when smart technology is built into a city. Early schemes are already at work in Barcelona and Southampton, UK – other cities are sure to follow suit with innovative and smart technology over the next few years.

On Our Roads
Most high-end cars being sold today already have a high degree of connectivity, and the automotive industry is not going to slow down in delivering optimal user experience and embracing the IoT. Car manufacturers over the next five years will drive a revolution in how people both buy and use their vehicles. Increased accessibility will mean you can adjust car temperature, check mileage, or even start the ignition from an app. Also, with more control over cars at all times, users will benefit from better security.

The IoT is transforming every day physical objects like phones, watches and cars and creating an ecosystem of information that will enrich our lives. As more and more things enter into the digital fold, the IoT is en route to becoming the defining disruptive technology of our time.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...