Step aside, Big Data, the Internet of Things is coming through

If you haven’t noticed, the drum beat of Big Data discussions has been subsiding lately. Big Data is more of a fact describing volume, velocity and variety of data, not a trend like “automation,” and that’s a major part of what’s causing the term to fall away. Worse, lots of the discussion around Big Data points out that some of the most valuable data isn’t big at all, nor fast, and maybe doesn’t have much variety, either. This is the issue that makes a nauseating number of terms part of the landscape as people say, “No, it’s really VALUE,” or veracity, or or any other V word. Enough.

The Internet of Things

Focusing on data’s best v-enabled definition is a bit silly considering what’s really at stake. The Internet of Things, meaning the connection of uniquely identifiable things to an Internet that is primarily people-occupied, is where the real discussion needs to be. Those “Things” will be able to identify themselves to people and other devices, creating a vastly larger pool of communication on the Internet. Things can act alone or in unison, and they can act with direction from humans or completely autonomously. A common example is the Nest thermostat, now part of Google’s empire or the sensors in the field that help farmers better use water.

In reality, Things go far beyond devices that report ambient conditions and maybe change settings. Things will seek out and connect to other things and will gradually increase their processing power, just as smartphones have come a significant distance since their start. Things will need to be energy efficient (often operating off the electrical grid to be effective), highly reliable, secure, protected from people and weather, and, above all else, cost-effective. We’ve started down the path to solve these challenges but there is enormous room for improvement and innovation.

Things are a new layer of machines that aren’t centralized (as nearly all machines have been to date) and are of the most value when dispersed. Such machines take over an enormous number of tasks that humans performed in the past and bring tireless accuracy to a connected world.

New architectures

Working with dispersed, often autonomous machines that have increasing processing power throws today’s information architectures a serious curve. Data flow will need to be significantly faster — and that means faster from many sources, faster on the network, and faster in propagation to many destinations. Trusting devices in far flung environments put great pressure on security and data’s “thickness” — it’s consistency and size. Getting data from, through and to the right places is an enormous task that takes cutting edge technologies and techniques.

Making data fast and thick makes the Big Data conversation more like a children’s book than the complex novel of the Internet of Things.