The Internet of Things (IoT) is fast becoming a household name and has seen consistent growth in popularity in businesses, workplaces and cities, as well as in domestic household usage.

For those who aren’t aware, IoT is essentially an ecosystem of devices and technologies connected via the internet that constantly collect and transmit data to be analysed and implemented.

Day-to-day examples of devices that make up part of IoT are smart meters and virtual assistants.

With the growing popularity of IoT, businesses need to stay on top of what IoT to look for in 2023.

What can we expect from 2023?

The short answer to that is more growth. IoT in 2023 is expected to continue its explosive expansion, with the number of installed IoT items predicted to hit 30.9 billion by 2025. This results from a significant expectation of increased investment, resulting in more than $1 trillion spent on IoT developments in 2023. This translates to more incentives for designing and producing IoT hardware and developing and applying the rapidly growing software aspect of IoT.

For some perspective on the rapid uptake of IoT technologies, consider that they are being adopted at a faster rate globally than the historic adoptions of electricity and telephones. While it’s true that technology grows proportionally, the adoption of IoT is predicted to continue growing exponentially more than contemporary tech over the next few years.

This translates to an expected increase in the market value of $6trn by 2025, outstripping other technological developments comfortably.

Which trends are driving this growth?

Numerous trends will no doubt contribute to the continued expansion of IoT in 2023. Here we’ve broken down a few trends that will have the most significant impact.

Remote monitoring

Remote monitoring is a software type that allows Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to supervise and, when necessary, control IT systems, allowing various valuable interventions. For example, remotely installing new software to devices or observing the behaviour of a managed device for performance analysis and diagnostics.

A McKinsey study showed that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital tech by approximately seven years. In a remote monitoring context, this is mainly because lockdowns precipitated the need to analyse and automate procedures from a distance.

While brought about by necessity, these technological advances have been retained as the relevance of the pandemic begins to reduce. In addition, the remote monitoring aspect of IoT has been adopted to monitor structural integrity and occupancy levels in buildings, as well as machine performance and automated learning, resulting in its predicted relevance as one of the most significant impacts of IoT in 2023.

Data analysis

Data is one of the most important strategic weapons in a business’ arsenal as it allows stakeholders to plan and execute their strategies with the help of confident future predictions.

With the buying and selling of IoT data predicted to become even more essential to developing IoT in 2023, it’s clear that IoT promises to play a substantial role in the development of data collection and analytics in several ways.

A primary example of this is the use of IoT devices in the supply chain sector. With supply chain elements being able to collect data from interaction points and transmit it quickly, businesses can avoid crises and minimise their impact, allowing supply chains to continue to run smoothly.

IoT data can also be used in a more customer-based way via marketing. By utilising household IoT devices like virtual assistants and smart meters, businesses can monitor their customers’ behaviour and preferences, allowing them to tailor their subsequent marketing strategies accordingly.

Smart cities

Smart cities have developed over recent years to incorporate IoT data collection techniques. The aim is to provide a more citizen-friendly, ecologically and financially viable way to manage a metropolitan area. This is predicted to continue as a prominent IoT trend for 2023. Smart cities use initiatives including connected sensors, lights and meters to collect and analyse data, which is then implemented to adapt and improve infrastructure and utilities.

An exciting aspect of smart city development is the innovations surrounding digital twins, virtual representations of physical objects. An example of this in action is Bentley Systems and GPS Lands Singapore working together to develop a digital twin of the entire city of Singapore.

It integrates information on buildings, transport, parks, drainage and more to allow city operators to monitor everything from traffic to bridge maintenance, as well as simulating floods for disaster planning.

Amsterdam is another interesting case study here. As one of the first cities in Europe to embrace an integrated smart city model, Amsterdam has introduced an incentivisation system whereby citizens can receive energy storage units when they connect their homes to the smart grid.

The result of this is to create a system whereby the current and voltage of the electricity grid can be constantly monitored. This could result in a vastly increased efficiency which, in turn, could see a reduction in energy prices and an improvement in CO2 performance.

It’s clear to see that across the world cities are embracing IoT to make communities run in a greener, more efficient way.

Healthcare

The onset of the pandemic drew innovative solutions to healthcare, and this is predicted to be a top IoT trend for 2023. The development of specialised medical smart devices like fitness bracelets, watches, smart scales and pressure gauges are examples of how IoT has percolated from business-level innovations to consumer and patient realities.

The benefit of these devices is that they can analyse and transmit highly accurate measurements of the body’s fundamental indicators, allowing treatment to be altered accordingly. Conversely, they can also allow a medical professional to analyse the efficacy or side effects of the treatment they have administered, meaning the gap between medicine and response is reduced at both ends.

Aspects where IoT is expected to grow within the medical sector next year include IoT-enabled hygiene monitoring devices that could reduce the chances of patient infection, as well as asset management allowing pharmacists to monitor temperature and humidity levels more accurately, for example.

Security: IoT’s big challenge

The larger surface area that would inevitably result from the growth of IoT in 2023 provides a substantially greater avenue of attack for cybercriminals. The lack of user education that is often present in IoT devices, as well as the relative ease with which they can be misplaced or stolen, giving access to unauthorised users, present complex security risks.

The result could be an increase in the prevalence of botnets. These networks of hijacked devices controlled by cyber-criminals and are often used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which attempt to disrupt a target’s server, network or service by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic. DDoS attacks utilise numerous infiltrated systems as sources of attack traffic, which can include computers, as well as IoT devices. This presents an even greater risk to IoT devices as administrators cannot always control which devices connect to their network. While vendors do not see this as a major risk, there has not been a great deal of action to form a regulatory protocol to protect customers. This could result in ongoing challenges when considering how to integrate IoT with business in 2023.

Can we help to make your organisation IoT-friendly?

Whether or not you know what you need from IoT, we can help you. To learn more about how to integrate IoT with your business in 2023, look at our IoT services page, or contact us for an in-depth discussion about your business or project’s tech talent needs.