IoT Services

As many as 1 trillion connected devices will exist by 2025. Everything is connected, from consumer electronics to home appliances to medical devices and industrial equipment. Deploying, securing, and maintaining these connected devices is complex and requires many different capabilities and technologies throughout a single device lifecycle. Protiviti’s end-to-end IoT services address this complex, connected domain by empowering your organization to deploy, secure, and maintain IoT devices throughout their lifecycle, ultimately reducing costs, increasing revenue, improving your customer experience and unlocking valuable insights.

What is Internet of Things (IoT)?

Combined with other capabilities such as data storage, analytics, visualization tools and security, IoT devices are impacting the way all industries, governments and consumers interact with the physical world.

Benefits of IoT

Chances are you use IoT devices every day and may not even be conscious that it is an IoT device. For those that have grown up in the digital world, connectivity and the benefits it provides are often expected in our day-to-day activities. But as business usage of connected devices expands, organizations are seeing increased benefits including:

• Automated and efficient processes
• Access to live, updated data
• Better utilization of human resources and increased productivity
• Enhanced asset utilization
• Cost savings
• Innovation – new products and services

Examples of IoT

Devices such as smartphones, tablets and computers are obvious examples of IoT devices. And there are many more examples in the consumer world such as wearable fitness tracking devices, autonomous vehicles and smart cars that provide smart breaking.

But IoT is prevalent in business and in every industry. Here are a few examples:

Financial Service organizations are using IoT data to track customer usage of ATMs and how they use debit and credit cards. Insurance organizations use connected devices to gather real time information on driving habits and activity.

Healthcare organizations are using IoT to connect doctors and nurses to real time patient information improving the quality of care and patient safety.

Logistics and Transportation organizations use IoT to track assets as they move goods and supplies across the country, allowing them to better understand the performance of their fleet and schedule needed maintenance.

Energy and Utility companies are receiving feeds of data regarding heating, cooling and electricity usage without ever physically reading a meter allowing them to identify and anticipate increased power needs and drive operational efficiency.

Real Estate and building management firms are installing IoT lighting IoT devices to save energy and money and elevator control sensors to track and identify inspection and maintenance notifications.

All types of business companies are installing smart TVs and smart cameras that connect personnel in their global organizations to networks, intranets and data.

Retail organizations are leveraging IoT to identify users who are in their stores that are logged into the corporate website and serve up coupons to drive additional sales, identify when shelves are low on inventory and need to be restocked, drone deliveries, and the ability to scan a UPC code and pay for your purchases directly via a smartphone.

Challenges in implementing IoT

The IoT provides organizations exciting opportunities to innovate and gain competitive advantage and efficiencies. As organizations pursue digital transformation and implement IoT devices, risk management should be top of mind – but is often overlooked or not considered. We are seeing a significant increase in organizations, who:

• do not have an inventory of current assets being utilized in their organization with IoT capabilities;
• do not have the capability to identify potential threats or monitor suspicious traffic on these devices;
• do not have a plan, nor the skills and ability to update IoT devices if a security vulnerability is identified;
• do not have controls in place to manage security and risks that IoT introduces to an organization; and
• do not have a technology or business resiliency plan.
• integrate IoT with other technologies to take advantage of other capabilities including blockchain, artificial intelligences, machine learning, robotic process automation, cloud and enterprise data analytics.