Describe Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Welcome to describe internet of things or IoT technologies, and moreover, welcome to the CWISA course. In this course, we're going to be exploring pretty much everything that revolves around this concept of internet of things. IoT is a growing trend. It's been a growing trend for the better part of a decade at this point. But the reality is that a lot of IoT organizations are struggling to catch up to needs that IoT brings to the table.

0:30There are a lot of organizations out there that are adopting IoT and really necessitates this question to begin with which is, what exactly is the internet of things? Because we've had the internet of things in a sense for a very long time. I mean, I've had laptops, I've had now phones, smartphones that can connect to the internet. But there is a difference between those devices, which are intended for me, a user, to be able to fire up. For example, here's my phone, I can pull out my phone and I can use my phone. This is a human type of device.

1:02A human interfacing type of device. Meanwhile, though, we've got a lot of devices that, yeah, at the end of the day, they're there for our benefit in some fashion, but they are not actively communicating to a user. For example, I've got a control deck right here. I can hit this button and maybe that button and bring on some additional lights in my studio. And so that's great that these light bulbs are connected to my other device. And, yes, again, I have to push a button to make it happen. But the reality is that that is a network connected light bulb that is enabling me in my life in some way to be a little bit more automated.

1:37I've got quite a few things around my house that would be maybe considered smart or connected devices. I have a coffee maker. I just made some coffee. And this coffee came out of a smart coffee maker, meaning that it's internet enabled. I can get in there, I can configure my drink exactly how I want it using an app. It's so connected that if it runs out of coffee beans, it can automatically order more coffee beans for me, in that way, I don't have to keep a supply on hand. And so this is the level of intelligence that these devices are introducing. I've got a garage door outside that will close if it's still open at 10 o'clock at night because chances are I forgot to close it.

2:12And then we've got other things-- I've got a bathroom scale I can step on and it will record my weight, and so on and so forth. So we've got this world of connected devices that are enabling things maybe even from a home automation perspective. But then, the question is, how exactly does it apply to our business world? And once we establish the business use case for some of these types of devices, especially looking at things like RFID tracking now, we can look at inventory, we can really apply this to a little bit more of a business focus. Well, at that point, what is the load now on our IT staff?

2:44Because we need to understand how exactly all these devices are communicating, maybe they're communicating via Wi--Fi, but maybe they're not communicating via Wi-Fi. And there's a lot of reasons why we might not want our IoT devices to communicate via Wi-Fi. And so in this skill, we're going to be focusing in on exactly what IoT is going to be-- first of all, define IoT but then, what are some of the implications to IoT? What are some of the benefits? What are some of the challenges? And so, we're going to be unpacking it from that perspective. But again, when we zoom out and look at this entire course, the course is really designed to number one, address the blueprint of the CWISA.

3:22But number two, focus in on what the CWISA is all about, which is understanding from a wireless perspective, the types of things that we as an IT organization maybe need to think about and have skills with in order to properly deploy IoT. So with that, let's go ahead and dive into this world of the internet of things. I'll see you in the next video.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Well, if we're going to jump into a course about Internet of Things types of devices, then we need to start with a very basic question, which is, what in the world is the Internet of Things or what we are more commonly going to refer to as IoT? Well, let's take a look. At this point, wireless networking has been around for decades. In fact, Wi-Fi itself came out in the late 1990s. And so what we have here is an enormous convenience for the many devices that are in our lives.

0:32And this convenience actually led to the creation of many other devices. And so when we think about what we, as humans, use from a wireless perspective, we often think about things like our laptops and our phones, for example. These are very common devices that we're going to use that involve wireless networking. But this naturally extends into other worlds. We can talk about tablets, for example. We can talk about maybe even game controllers or gaming systems. And so we've got all kinds of wireless peripherals. And the idea with all of these is that a human being is actively using them when they are in use.

1:06But what we've started to really see, especially over the last decade, is the creation of many wireless devices that, when they're in use, they are not necessarily being used by humans. This is the world of the Internet of Things, or IoT. The Internet of Things is really more of a category. It's maybe what we'd call an umbrella term, as there are a lot of different types of devices that fall under this category. And so when we think about Internet of Things, oftentimes we'll see people refer to maybe connected devices. We'll see a lot of people refer to smart devices.

1:39And again, we mentioned a lot of home automation types of devices often refer to themselves as smart devices and such. And so what we find is that we've just got a bunch of devices, many of which connect wirelessly, and they're connecting out to the internet and providing some value to us. And so at that point, we might ask the question-- I mean, we've had our laptops and we've had our phones for a long time. I mean, these devices are connected to the internet. So couldn't we just refer to this as a collection of things connected to the internet? Couldn't we call our laptops and our phones an Internet of Things? And the answer is no.

2:09We cannot refer to it this way because, once again, these devices are being accessed by users, or they really don't provide much value on their own. IoT devices are designed to operate independent of human interaction. Think about a couple of the examples I gave in the introduction. For example, I mentioned my coffeemaker. I've got this coffeemaker, and it is called a smart coffeemaker. And the reason for that is because of a few things. First of all, it's able to be connected to. So I can connect to it via my smartphone.

2:41I can program it to do things. I can make sure that it fills a cup of coffee on a timer, for example. I could actually set it to brew coffee as soon as I wake up, before I even step into the kitchen. But it's also able to synchronize data to my phone. So I can see the status of the coffeemaker. There have been a couple of times where the coffeemaker is doing something. I'm not exactly sure what it's doing. So I fire up the app, and it tells me it's in a cleaning cycle, for example. And then beyond that, it's able to actually order products for me on my behalf.

3:11As long as I give it permission to do so, when it notices that my coffee beans are low, it's going to place an order. And for that matter, if it's about ready for a cleaning cycle, it can order cleaning products. I mean, it's absolutely incredible just how well-connected this coffeemaker is. Now, we'll notice that some of this, like synchronizing to my phone and, for that matter, setting a timer, these are done by me, as the human. However, we also see that it's operating independent of any kind of human interaction in this. So here's the question.

3:41If it's not communicating with a person, then what is it connecting to? Well, this coffeemaker is connecting to another machine. When we say another machine, I don't necessarily mean another machine in my house. I mean that it's connecting to some central server out on the internet, or potentially, it's connecting directly to my phone, in this case, where it's pushing data without my intervention. And so this type of traffic is what we call machine-to-machine. It's often abbreviated as M2M, like this. Machine-to-machine traffic means that it is truly communicating with another device, once again, independent of me getting in there and forcing it to communicate to another device.

4:19We can look at another example. In the intro video, I demonstrated what my lights look like. I can push a button on my Control Panel. And yes, this did require me to push a button. So as the user, I would have to insight some sort of trigger. And so maybe the trigger is me pushing a button. Maybe it's me setting an alarm or some sort of timer. But either way, once triggered, this device is going to reach out to the light bulb. And it's going to tell it exactly how it's supposed to behave. And so ultimately, what we find is that we have, once again, machine-to-machine traffic operating in this case.

4:50And so this is why we point to this light bulb and say that this is part of our Internet of Things. And so specifically, this would be referred to as an IoT device. Now, notice our terminology. We're calling this an IoT device. We are not referring to the light bulb as an IoT. When we're talking about the Internet of Things, that would be the larger network, the global set of devices that are all connecting to one another via this machine-to-machine traffic. And so this is just one part of that network. And so we're going to refer to this as a single device or, once again, an IoT device.

5:23So as we can imagine, there are a lot of benefits that are brought to the table by the Internet of Things. And so as we think about a few of these, and this would not be an exhaustive list, but just off the top of our heads, and we think about some of these benefits, first and foremost, we're going to see that there's a lot of automation that gets built into our lives based on IoT. When we have a lot of machines that are out there, like these light bulbs that can interface with another device, like a Control Panel, for example, in this case, we can set a whole lot of automation.

5:53When I think about the fact that my coffeemaker can automatically order a product for me, I don't have to think about it, well, that's incredible. It's one less thing I have to worry about in my life, and that's thanks to this IoT coffeemaker. IoT can also provide some deep insights. IoT conversations can often revolve around the concept of wearable technology. And so I might wear things that are health-driven. So I've got devices that are telling me about how well I eat, how well I sleep, how well I exercise, all of these things.

6:24This can all be connected and automatically provided to me. And it's going to provide me with some good, deep insights into my health and ideally how I can improve my health. Often tied to automation and deep insights would be the idea that IoT is going to ultimately save me some amount of time. And ideally, in some ways, it'll save me money. And this is a very important driver from a business perspective because in the business world, we care about things a little bit more revenue-driven and cost-driven than we care about whether it's the greatest and shiniest new technology.

6:58And so this is going to be huge from a business perspective. But from a home residential perspective, it might not make financial sense. But if it improves my lifestyle, my happiness, or the amount of time free time that I have potentially, then maybe I'd be more willing to spend some money on that. And so we especially think about home automation in this regard. Now, that said, there are definitely going to be some challenges that are introduced, especially from an IT perspective, when we're talking about IoT. First and foremost, when we talk about IoT from a business perspective, we are generally talking about a very high density of devices.

7:34We might be talking about RFID trackers. We might be talking about sensors that are going to be responding to certain things. And oftentimes, we have a lot of these. And so this is going to introduce the concept of management. How am I going to manage all of these devices? How am I going to connect them to my network and get them integrated with the system? And we're going to need some tools in IT in order to help us deal with this. Second of all, we need to worry about the networking element of IoT. We need to ask the question, how are these devices all connecting to one another via some kind of network?

8:05Now, our initial reaction is probably going to be, well, we've got this great Wi-Fi connectivity and technology. Let's go ahead and take advantage of it. But is Wi-Fi really the best fit for IoT? And oftentimes, we are going to find that Wi-Fi doesn't deliver everything we need from an IoT perspective. And we'll see exactly why here coming up within the skill. Now, a third one, and this is a major one for any organization, it is security. We are now talking about having potentially connected fridges in our environment. And so if I connect a smart fridge into the kitchen area or the break room, for example, and now this fridge has a vulnerability, I mean, if there are hackers out there and they're able to compromise the fridge, can they then access our local area network?

8:50And from there, can they access some critical resources, maybe our servers in the data center and things like that? I mean, does the smart device-- do the IoT devices that we deploy, whether it's a fridge or, again, a sensor or potentially RFID trackers, I mean, can these devices present a security and a vulnerability risk that we are not prepared to take? And so as with all things, there are going to be pros and cons, and we just need to make sure that we understand all of that upfront before we go investing into an IoT solution. So we covered a lot of information here. And so at the end of those videos, I always like to do a quick review of some of the key points that we should, at a minimum, be taking away if we remember nothing else from the conversation.

9:29So at the very start of this, we defined IoT. And we said that the IoT, the Internet of Things, is a collection of devices that those devices are communicating without human interaction. And so again, we think about laptops and phones and things like that. These are designed to be used by a human. And so when we think about some of the other devices we talked about, those are more geared towards operating without direct human interaction. Yes, we can trigger them to behave in a certain way, and that's the whole point, that they're providing value to us as humans, but they are communicating among other machines.

10:04And so when we look at the benefits of IoT, these devices can bring us all kinds of neat features. And so we've got the ability to introduce automation, for example. We said they can provide some deep data insights. So think about health tracking, for example. We can do location tracking services. We can track devices as they go around our area. And so yeah, we've got some residential applications for this, but we're going to find that there's a lot of business applications as well. Now, it does introduce a whole lot of challenges, as we saw. We've got to worry about management. We have to worry about networking. And we have to worry about security.

10:35And so again, these aren't meant to be exhaustive lists of the pros and cons, but it certainly at least gets the conversation started around why we would go the route of deploying IoT solutions but ultimately also making sure we understand that if we deploy IoT, then we are going to be introducing some challenges, which ultimately, a lot of what we're here to talk about is how we end up dealing with those IoT challenges and successfully deploy IoT solutions into our environments. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] I tell you what, it's pretty hard to go to the electronic store without seeing all kinds of devices being advertised as smart this, smart that. And so we see that there are some smart devices out there, but are they actually smart devices? Because we need to differentiate between smart devices and connected devices. Both of which are IoT devices, but ultimately, they can mean very different things. So this is going to be a little bit of a definition of terms type of video, but we do need to understand the difference between these two device types.

0:33Any time we are talking about IoT devices, this is typically language that we're going to see used in the corporate world. We're not necessarily going to see IoT used in the residential world, instead, we're going to see terms like smart and connected devices. Any time I mentioned going to the store, it seems like I flooded with the opportunity to buy some of these smart and connected devices. And that's because they're aimed at more residential applications. And so we think about things like home automation.

1:03If I want to automate my home maybe by deploying light bulbs into my house, I can automatically turn on and off, well, that would be labeled under home automation and that would be referred to as smart lighting. So, are all of these terms the same thing? Well, not really. IoT is really the larger category that contains both smart devices and connected devices all within itself. And so, with IoT, we're talking about the global entity that is the networking of all of these different devices regardless of the device type that's being networked together.

1:34Meanwhile, we've got all kinds of different types of devices. For example, we do have smart and connected devices, but these are two different types of devices. So let's talk about these two terms. Let's start with the idea of the connected device. Now, this term isn't used often enough. Honestly, it should be used way more often because a lot of the devices that are called smart devices would more accurately be described as connected devices. A connected device is focused on the sending and receiving of data. They might be collecting data and sending it out to some repository, or they might be a device like my light bulb that receives a signal and it's going to do something with it as a result.

2:12And what's key here is that with their focus of sending and receiving data, they are not focused on the concept of making decisions. So what are some examples of this? Well, once again, I just mentioned my lights. Yeah, I've got this control panel. I can touch the control panel, and it will communicate via machine to machine traffic to tell my light bulb to come on, or I can turn it off for that matter. And this is great other than did the light bulb make the decision to turn on or did it make the decision to turn off and the answer is no. The light bulb didn't make that decision.

2:44I as the user made that decision in some fashion. Now same thing with my garage door, I've got this smart garage door opener. And I as the user, I don't necessarily trigger it. I mean, I can from my phone app, for example, I could use the app and I could trigger my garage door to go up or down. But more to the point, I actually set an alarm for 10 o'clock at night. And so at 10 o'clock PM, my garage door is going to see that, hey, I'm open, it's 10:00 o'clock, which is what I was configured for, and it's going to tell the garage door to close at that point.

3:17But once again, did the garage door opener, did it make the decision in order to do that? And we could argue it made the decision because it saw that it was 10 o'clock and it decided to close the door, but it didn't really make a decision based on the current data that it's reading. Ultimately, it was triggered by my alarm that I as the user created. So, yes, these devices are IoT devices, they are connected devices, but I wouldn't call them smart devices. And the reason is right here. They are not making any decisions, but rather they're reacting to some kind of trigger that we have configured beforehand.

3:51Now, is there value in this type of device? Absolutely. I mean, I absolutely love my lights. I absolutely love my garage door. But these are not smart devices, at least, not by the definition that we are putting out there. So when we turn our attention to our smart devices and what the smart devices are delivering as we might imagine, this has to do with the decision-making process. We want our devices that really are truly smart devices to be able to make decisions based on what they're seeing and what they're sensing. And so, let's talk about my coffee maker one more time, I guess I really like this thing.

4:25But this coffee maker as we mentioned, has a sensor in it. And this sensor can do one of two things. It could alert me to the fact that, hey, we're out of coffee and so maybe that would make this a connected device because it senses something it triggers and it does something that I want it to do for me. However, the more interesting thing about it is that it can actually make the decision to order more coffee beans based on what the sensor is telling it. This is a decision. It is not something that has been pre-programmed.

4:57I didn't say that every five days I want you to order more coffee for me. I mean, certainly that would also be useful, but potentially not as useful as I'm either probably going to order too much or not enough coffee at that point. Instead, it's going to be very precise with the coffee making because I'm going to find that coffee shows up on my doorstep and turn around and realize that the coffee maker has started to get empty. And so this is a very important distinction between what we consider to be connectivity which would be more of this alert or trigger-based mechanism versus making decisions based on data.

5:28And ultimately, based on input that it's getting from a device like a sensor or an RFID tag and those kinds of things. Now, naturally, this coffee maker has some connected types of behaviors as well. For example, it can also brew coffee based on an alarm in the same way my garage door operates on an alarm. But this isn't really a decision again, it's behaving in a pre-programmed way, and so I would say that this over here, this is the smart behavior and then this alarm concept, this would be connected behavior. Now if my coffee maker was brewing coffee in response to my caffeine level, maybe I have some sort of health device that I'm wearing.

6:06A wearable health tech. And it's telling my coffee maker that, hey, caffeine is low in my bloodstream, and therefore, it's time to brew some coffee for me. Now that would be smart behavior. And I don't know that that'll ever happen, probably at one point, it will. There'll be some gimmicky coffee maker out there that ties into our health system that we've got going on with our IoT devices. But ultimately, as of today, this is more just a hypothetical. But this would be smart behavior as well because it's sensing things using sensors and then it's making a decision on when to do things.

6:39So let's leave my coffee maker alone for a minute and let's think of some other examples of this. And we can go to a lot of different systems that are built around sensors. Now, the interesting thing here is that the sensors themselves, these are usually going to be connected devices. They're not making any decisions, they're just doing the sending and receiving of data that we mentioned and so it's collecting information and sending it back to some kind of centralized system. But, that connectivity maybe does go to a system and then it makes decisions. For example, what if this was a moisture sensor and so we've got these sensors that are maybe in a greenhouse or out in a farm field.

7:16And so when moisture is low, it's going to trigger and realize that, hey, it's time to do something here. And so I'm going to trigger the watering system to do something. Now, the system in place maybe it involves a lot of sensors and so we've got this centralized system, but we see the machine to machine behavior right here. This doesn't involve a human. If it was alerting me and saying, hey, you should water the plants, then I could go to the watering system and tell the watering system to trigger things as well. But that would be more of a connected type of device where in this case, it is using machine to machine traffic in order to bypass bothering a human being and simply do exactly what we want it to do which is to make the decision to water our plants on our behalf.

7:59And so, do we see a little bit of gray area between our connected devices and smart devices? Absolutely. Because we could argue that some of these behaviors on the right are trigger-based. We could argue that some of the behaviors on the left are kind of making decisions. And so, yeah, we might find that the definition of this could be nebulous or maybe a little bit fuzzy. And so what we need to do is just understand. Generally speaking, at the heart of this is there a decision-making process happening independent of human beings. If a device really just goes out and tells a human that, hey, it's time to do something and the human has to go do it.

8:34Well, that would be more of a connected device. So, again, I think of my light bulbs where I as the human am really telling the light bulb what to do even though I'm relying on a connected system in order to make it happen. But if I were to evolve my lights and now my lights have sensors, and my sensors are detecting whether there's a human being in the room or not and it automatically turns the lights off if there's nobody in there, well, at this point, it sort of evolves into smart lighting. And so it's not that lighting can't be smart but usually, there's not a decision-making process that's happening when we talk about smart lights, unless we have something like this that's also working in tandem with them.

9:12And so as we now go out into the world and we see all of the advertised smart products, hopefully, we have a little bit of a better understanding of how we can differentiate between what products are advertised as smart and which ones are actually giving us smart behavior. Well, there are certainly a lot of terms that we're going to have to get to know when it comes to IoT, and so we start at the top here just looking at the phrase IoT. IoT is more of this umbrella term. It's going to refer to everything in our world of connected devices, whether they're truly connected or truly smart and there's going to be other categories of these types of devices as well.

9:44We can get a little more granular and look at sensors versus trackers versus wearable tech and these kinds of things. They're all IoT devices, and then they can break up into other individual categories from there. Now connected devices, the key here is that we're not going to expect them to make decisions on our behalf. Yeah, we might have trigger based mechanisms, I might set alarms, I might set thresholds and have it behave a certain way, but it's really not receiving input and doing something without me really being involved in that process in some way.

10:15Now conversely, smart devices, they're actually able to make decisions based on how they've been programmed. And so, yeah, there's still human programming happening there, but at the same time, it's focused on the idea that it can receive input in and make a decision and then do something as a result. And so one of the best examples really is the light situation because I can click this button and turned my lights on, I would say that's a connected light, that's not a smart light situation. However, if I got up and I left my office and the lights detected that and decided to turn themselves off to save power, well, that would be more of a smart behavior.

10:50And so the more examples we see of this, the better equipped will be to really differentiate between connected and smart devices regardless of how they're being advertised and marketed. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] As we might imagine, IoT involves more than just a couple of devices talking to one another. Oftentimes, there are systems in place that are going to communicate to some of these devices. We might have a couple of devices. We're going to have dozens or hundreds or thousands of these IoT devices. And so in this video, we're going to explore some of these different concepts that come together, and especially think about things from an IT perspective because we're going to have to support this system. And so let's start to identify some of the technologies that we should start getting comfortable with.

0:34Let's start with one of the basic building blocks of IoT, which would be the IoT device. For a lot of us, we tend to focus on the IoT device because that's what we're purchasing potentially. We've mentioned a lot of these. We've got the light bulbs, for example. We've got the coffee maker. We've got the garage door opener. But then as we get into a little bit more of a corporate mindset, we might think about things like sensors. We mentioned the soil sensors or moisture sensors that are detecting whether or not we should water our plants, for example. We've also got things like trackers.

1:06So we might call them RFID tags or something along those lines that help us to track different components, or packages, or whatever it is that we are tracking. And so in a lot of cases, we're going to find that IoT device is meant to be highly mobile. Now, we're going to find that there are some devices that aren't mobile. Well, let's just talk about the mobile devices to begin with. If we've got mobile devices, they are going to be a lot of shared characteristics with them. First and foremost, if they're mobile, then they are probably somewhat small in nature. And yeah, that's an arbitrary designation for it.

1:37But the idea here is that if we're going to equip trackers on things, well, then we probably want them to be small enough to be attached to those things. If I want to track laptops, for example, I wouldn't want a big bulky tracker on there. I'd want something small and largely unnoticeable. And so we could say small. We could also just in general call it a low-profile type of device, something that's not too intrusive to carry around. Not too heavy, not too big, and so on and so forth. We are also going to find that we're going to need a high range on these devices. Because especially if they are mobile and they're moving around, we need to make sure they're always connected.

2:11But even if they're not necessarily mobile, but maybe, again, we've got these moisture sensors that are out in the field, well, do we have an access point near those fields? How far do those devices need to transmit in order to communicate out to the network? And so this is why we're going to need some level of range on whatever network we deploy for these devices. Another thing to consider is that we need battery life. This is absolutely mission critical. There are a lot of IoT devices that are designed to expire when the battery life expires.

2:42And so once the battery is dead, that means that the device is dead and we need to get a new device. And so whether this is the design or whether we as the IT staff have to go out and replace or charge batteries, either way the battery life is going to play into the management of our IoT devices. Now, fortunately, one of the characteristics of IoT devices typically involves a low amount of throughput. We are typically sensing information and sending that information. But somewhere around the kilobits per second range is all we're ever going to be communicating at.

3:15We don't need to send large amounts of information. And as a result, we don't need strong wireless connectivity, at least not at the same level that we're talking about for our phones and our laptops. So that describes the mobile type of devices. But we do actually have plenty of stationary devices as well. Some of these stationary devices might be quite large. So for example, let's think about maybe a smart fridge. We could deploy a smart fridge into our corporate breakroom, for example. And that's not going to be moving around. In fact, it might even be plugged in. We might have wired connectivity and wired power.

3:48This creates a very different set of needs for these stationary devices that we don't necessarily need on the mobile side. For example, because it's wired power, we no longer need to worry about batteries. And because of the network being wired in, we don't need to worry about range anymore. Now, a fridge is very large, but we might also have sensors, like we mentioned. The sensor is going out into a farm field, or sensors in a greenhouse, or sensors that are being deployed into a factory. These sensors are often very small. And so the size can vary quite a bit.

4:19We might be dealing with very large devices like a fridge or something very small that we need to worry about, making sure that they're in the right places and that we're tracking them appropriately. And so we see a very different set of needs that exist between the mobile side of IoT as well as the stationary side. And we need to be sensitive to both of these types of devices as we deploy them into our networks. Now, speaking of networks, let's talk about that because we are here talking about IoT, especially from a networking perspective.

4:50IoT devices are going to need to communicate with one another on some level. And I say on some level because some IoT devices are intended to check in now. And again, they're used to being disconnected for long periods of time. But other devices are intended to communicate constantly with one another. And so we need to recognize the type of network that's going to be required here. And so the question we have to ask is how, how are they going to be communicating with one another via some form of network? And our immediate response is probably going to be to use the existing Wi-Fi.

5:23A Wi-Fi has the advantage, first of all, of what I just said. It already exists. We don't have to deploy something new for this. And furthermore, we know it works great. It works great for our laptops. It works great for our phones. But we may have just noticed that in describing our different types of IoT devices, whether they're mobile or they're stationary, it doesn't really describe what we need for our laptops and our phones. And so this introduces some challenges to using Wi-Fi for the sake of our IoT devices. First of all, keep in mind that we need high range.

5:55And our 5 and our 6 gigahertz bands, they actually have very low range. And so very rarely will we see IoT devices being deployed that take advantage of 5 and 6 gigahertz. And so most of them are going to need to use 2.4 gigahertz. Now, we know that there are some major downsides at 2.4 gigahertz, especially that this band is very busy. And so we're going to be in lots of competition with all kinds of other devices, even independent of other IoT devices that are in our environments.

6:26There are a few other downsides to Wi-Fi we need to consider. First of all, power savings is a big deal. Power savings have been in Wi-Fi from the very beginning. However, keep in mind that our power savings are geared more towards laptops and phones, which are going to be active pretty often. And so most of our power savings don't allow for very long periods of sleep relative to what our laptops and our phones are used to doing. And yes, there have been some innovations in this space. However, Wi-Fi is trying to catch up to the power savings tools that other wireless technologies deliver.

6:57Wi-Fi is also extremely localized. We understand that in our cell phones, they have way greater range to the cell towers than they do to our Wi-Fi. As soon as I step out of my house, it's hard for me to connect to the Wi-Fi because of range. But what did we say? We need high range for our IoT devices. Some of these devices leave a building, they go outside. Some of them travel from site to site. And this is why we need a high amount of range even to the point that we might need connectivity outside of the realm of our Wi-Fi networks.

7:29So all of these challenges lead us to have a conversation about maybe deploying something that isn't Wi-Fi. And there are a lot of these non-Wi-Fi types of networks have been developed for the sake of IoT. And so we can start by just may be taking advantage of the cellular network. This isn't always the best from a cost efficiency perspective, but it's hard to beat the range and the proliferation, how widespread our cellular networks are. Now, if we're going back inside, we might consider the use of Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE.

8:00This is a version of Bluetooth that is designed especially with IoT in mind. It's going to be low-range, but it's going to have immense power savings benefits. And so it's going to very much extend our battery life by using BLE. Now, we can also use standard Bluetooth. And so if our network doesn't support BLE, then we might take advantage of standard Bluetooth. And this is used by a lot of home automation products. I think about my wearable tech. I might have, for example, a smartwatch and the smartwatch is going to use Bluetooth to connect to my phone.

8:30And this is the machine to machine traffic right here. That's the extent of it. And so standard Bluetooth is going to work in this case, even if it's not the most efficient especially from a power perspective. Now from here, we've got several technologies that might be unfamiliar to us as networking engineers. For example, we've got Zigbee. Zigbee is based on the 802.15.4 specification, and it provides an alternative to Wi-Fi for wireless communications within a building. Then we've also got some other options. For example, we've got LoRaWAN.

9:02LoRaWAN builds out a wireless area network that isn't going to use our cell towers. And from there, we've got Sigfox. Although keep in mind that even though we've got all of these options, and we'll be going into more detail on all of these options throughout this course, we can still use Wi-Fi. This is a viable option in a lot of cases. And so we're not saying that we'll never use Wi-Fi for our IoT devices. However, it might make more sense to use some of these non-Wi-Fi options. And so what's fascinating about the CWISA is that we're going to be focused a little bit more on this non-Wi-Fi communications technology.

9:36But we do still have to keep Wi-Fi in mind for all of this. And so we'll be bouncing back and forth between the two. Now, I would like to take a moment and point out that we do have different needs for IoT devices. And we'll see this repeated throughout this course. But these needs are very different from our standard Wi-Fi devices. For example, in most cases, we don't care that much about throughput. Like we mentioned, a lot of our devices, especially our sensors and such, they're going to be putting out maybe kilobits per second. And so we don't necessarily need these high throughput and Wi-Fi 6E devices.

10:08Instead, we really care more about range and we care more about power consumption. We want to keep our power consumption down. And so these are the care abouts from an IoT perspective more so than what we'd expect from a Wi-Fi perspective, which usually with Wi-Fi, we're carrying a lot more about throughput. We don't care as much about range because we've got access points everywhere, especially with some of our high-density deployments. And power consumption were sort of halfway in between on because laptops and phones have very nice extended battery life.

10:41But naturally, it's always nice to have longer battery life. And so that's why we'll call that a wash. But again, very different needs from Wi-Fi. We're not focused on those needs. We are focused on the needs of the internet of things devices. Now, one last technology we want to make sure we deploy is the concept of an IoT manager. These IoT management systems or IoT managers, however I want to say it, these systems are typically software that we're going to deploy that are going to help us to manage our IoT infrastructure.

11:11For example, we might truly have thousands of IoT devices. How exactly do we track all of these IoT devices? How do we know their battery status? How do we know where they are? Well, this is what this software is going to provide. It's going to give us all of that information, a lot of statistics on IoT devices. It's going to help with the onboarding of new IoT devices. So I just get a bunch of new sensors in. I need to connect them into the system. How do I do that? Well, an IoT management solution is going to help me to, again, get those devices on board with whatever architecture that I have.

11:45Now, one thing to note here is that this isn't the same as these mobile device managers, or MDMs, that are often sold in the Wi-Fi market. Mobile device managers are often more focused on laptops and phones and really ultimately are user-driven devices. And so we might be worried about a user logging into a laptop, for example, from a security perspective. And that works for a user devices like laptops, but we don't need to worry about that from an IoT perspective. Now, naturally, there will be some gray area in the space as some MDM platforms will claim that they can help with IoT devices.

12:19And just keep in mind that usually once again, as we said down here, that the needs are different between the systems. And as a result, we will probably want to look for a dedicated IoT management solution that will fit our needs better than an MDM that we might already be using for the user-driven devices in our network. So we talked about these three different technologies. We talked about devices, the networking, management solutions. And so we look at IoT devices, we see that they've got different needs even among the different IoT devices. Oftentimes, our IoT devices are either going to be highly mobile, which means that they're going to need extended range, they're going to need pretty good battery life, power savings methodologies, or we might find that we've got stationary IoT devices that have very different needs than the mobile ones.

13:00And so we can't just look at IoT and say, OK, this is what I need for these IoT devices because different IoT devices will have different needs. Now, speaking of needs, Wi-Fi is really geared more towards user-driven devices that are focused on throughput and user experience. And so Wi-Fi isn't always the best fit for IoT devices. Yeah, a lot of IoT devices will be able to connect to the existing Wi-Fi. And there are benefits there, not the least of which is the Wi-Fi is already there. And so let's take advantage of it and not deploy something that's going to cost us more money.

13:32But we will find that we've got all kinds of other network options the IoT might take advantage of and we're going to be exploring a lot of these different network options throughout this course. Now lastly, as we saw the device managers, yeah, we've got these mobile device managers that we might be using already for our phones and our laptops. And some of them may even tout IoT features. But we do need to recognize that there's usually a difference between MDM, which are focused on user-driven devices, and these IoT managers, which are really going to help me with onboarding my IoT devices, tracking them, inventorying them.

14:02They're going to be a little bit more geared towards IoT needs than my laptops and my phones. And so it's probably worth checking out these different IoT device managers and making sure I've got the right software solution to help me to wrap my arms around my IoT deployments. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Well, we've given a lot of examples of IoT over the course of this skill, but let's go ahead and take a look specifically at what are some applications we can expect to see with IoT. And, yeah, we'll comment on residential, but our focus moving forward is going to be a little bit more on the business world. And so let's turn and see what exactly we can achieve by looking at things from a business perspective and also try to understand what types of value we're looking for if we're in the shoes of a business leader trying to decide whether to deploy an IoT solution.

0:35So we've already mentioned residential applications, let's go and think through at least a few more before moving on to the business world because our focus tends to be on home automation and this is where we can expect to see a lot of devices being advertised as smart or connected. And, yes, sometimes they're advertised as smart devices when they're really connected devices. So what kind of devices are out there? Well, a common one is going to be these days the smart doorbell. A lot of these smart doorbells are integrated with cameras and they can alert us to suspicious activity that's happening on our porch.

1:06We can also think about connected fridges which might have different compartments, and we can use those compartments to keep different foods at different temperatures. And we can use our phone apps in order to control them. We've also got things around our house like our televisions. We can connect to the internet, we can stream our favorite shows on our TVs and we don't need cable or anything like that in order to do that anymore. And then we've got things like speakers. I can have smart speakers around that I can have them play music off of the internet rather than playing it off of a local device here in my house.

1:37We also have a massive trend around health equipment. We mentioned wearable tech, and we can expect to see things like smartwatches that feed info into our apps and give us insights into our health. And so it's not just watches, though, we've also got things like wristbands that we can wear. We might insert a Fitbit into our wrist bands. I've got a smart water bottle for that matter. And it's really not smart, it's more of a connected water bottle, I suppose. But it tracks how much water I drink throughout the day and it will ping me if it feels like I'm not drinking enough water.

2:08And so a lot of these devices are changing the way that we live on a personal level, whether it's how we live or we work or we play, either way, this is a residential concept. It's really not geared towards business. And so as we try to shift gears, we might think, OK, well, what types of applications are there from a business perspective? In order to understand this, we need to think about a business because I don't know about you, but I love technology. And when I am a lover of technology, I might say, you know what, it's time to deploy the new technology because it's new and it's shiny and it's exciting.

2:42But new and exciting and shiny are not reasons to deploy technology at least from a business perspective. Businesses are going to care about something else. Their primary drivers are going to be centered around concepts such as revenue, for example, as well as costs and profit. And when we define these terms, the revenue is the amount of money that's brought into the company. The costs are the money that go out of the company, and generally, we want the costs to be less than the revenue because the profit is going to be the difference between revenue and costs.

3:13And so if I've got money left over, then that would be profit. And the whole point of being in business in most cases, is to turn a profit so we can continue to stay in business and pay our employees. And so I might look at this new technology and say, OK, yeah, that's great, but this is going to save me time. It's going to save me maybe an hour a day or something along those lines. And that's great if it's going to save me an hour a day, but what if it comes at a cost of $10,000 a day or something like that? At this point, we would say, OK, that's great and all. I mean, I would love to save an hour a day, but it just doesn't make business sense.

3:45It's way too much cost and it doesn't pay for itself in the long run. To be business relevant an IoT device or a system, it must provide business value. And increasing my business value is usually going to come down to either increasing my revenue or decreasing my costs. Both of which are going to result in turning a greater profit. For example, let's say I deploy a smart lighting system and this is truly a smart lighting system. It's going to detect if there's people around, it's going to turn lights off in rooms, and so on and so forth. So this smart lighting system across my enterprise, it might cost me $1 million to deploy, which sounds like a whole lot of money.

4:22I know that to me, it's a whole lot of money. But to a business, we might say, you know it's going to cost us $1,000,000 but over the long run, it's going to save us $3 million. At this point, we have a concept that we call Return On Investment or ROI. The return on investment here says that, yeah, we're paying $1,000,000 upfront, but it's going to save me $3 million. I know from a home budget perspective if we could spend $1,000 up front and save $3,000 in the long run, that is a justifiable expense because of return on investment.

4:54So what are some other business relevant IoT systems? One of the big ones we're going to care about is the tracking concept. If I can deploy tracking within my environment, I can possibly make my business far more efficient in a lot of ways. So, for example, I might be tracking my inventory. If I can manage my inventory better oftentimes, this results in being able to crank out products faster or slower on an as needed basis and I'm not sitting on a bunch of inventory that's costing me money. Tracking can also help to prevent theft in a lot of cases.

5:27A common example of the way that IoT can help prevent theft would be with hospitals worrying about wheelchairs. Oftentimes, wheelchairs can disappear. The patients will take them out to their cars, and they might just fold them up and take them away with them. But if a wheelchair is equipped with a tracker and it crosses a certain boundary something that we call geofencing which we'll be talking about later, then we can alert a guard to walk out and just make sure that they don't take that wheelchair and fold it up and put it in the back of their car.

5:57And so if we have to pay some amount of money in order to deploy the tracking application and the tracking IoT devices, yeah, it's going to cost money up front, but if it prevents theft or if it helps me not have to go out and buy more wheelchairs constantly, then it will pay for itself in the long run and it comes back to this return on investment concept. We've also got sensor systems that we can put into place. And so our sensors might include things like the smart lighting that I just mentioned. So now we've got sensors in rooms and it can detect when there's nobody there and it can turn lights off.

6:29We can also have this tied to the HVAC system. And so my heating, and my ventilation, and my AC, my air conditioning, and that's what we call HVAC. And so if there's nobody in the building, then, hey, why keep the building fully heated during the winter? We might be able to take it down 5 or 10 degrees when nobody's there. And conversely when somebody shows up, we automatically start heating the room for them or the whole building if needed. But either way, this can also save a lot of money. There are also plenty of ways to deploy devices that are going to increase the efficiency of my employees or the efficiency of my processes.

7:02And what we're going to find is that there are just dozens of different applications of IoT devices that are ultimately going to drive business value, and ultimately, justify the cost of deploying those kinds of systems. Now, in fairness, there are sometimes other drivers at play. So we tend to focus on the revenue and the profit concept, but we might find that we've got special initiatives that we're trying to meet. So even if it comes at a net cost or a net loss, then at that point, if we're satisfying certain initiatives that means that it's still viewed as a success.

7:34And so, for example, if our smart lighting is going to cost $1 million, but it only saves us maybe $750,000 a year, we'd say, well, that's a net loss of $250,000. But maybe we have an initiative to reduce our electricity use. And so the fact that our electricity use goes down, yeah, it's going to come at a cost to us, but it satisfies the initiative to use lower electricity. This might be a company initiative that says, hey, we would like to be more sensitive to environmental concerns and so we're trying to reduce electricity usage, but it can also be a regulatory thing.

8:09We might live in a part of the world where we have to reduce our electricity or risk paying severe fines. And so regardless of the reason for the initiative, we might find that there are reasons to deploy systems that come at a net cost to the organization. Now, one of the realities of this whole situation is that a lot of these decisions are made on the business side, meaning that our managers, our directors potentially our executives are making these decisions and they're deciding things like, I'm going to deploy this IoT system or that IoT set of devices.

8:40And those decisions end up coming down to us in IT. And we, in IT, are expected to manage the IoT devices. We're expected to deploy them and to onboard them and to make this system work. And so that's the whole reason why we're here is to understand and learn the IoT systems because we might be handed a bunch of equipment that we have to deploy. Now, every now and again, we might have to go back to the business leaders and say, hey, you decide to do this, but we need to deploy a whole Bluetooth low-energy system to support it, that kind of thing.

9:10And so this is yet another reason why it's so important that we understand this technology that we are going to ultimately be responsible for managing and deploying. So as we see here, we've got a lot of different applications that we might see deployed from an IoT perspective. And it does start with residential applications because for a lot of us, we've got-- maybe that technology we've started to deploy at home or maybe we've thought about deploying or at least we've seen some videos on and say, wow, that's cool. And so we understand what some of these home automation or health gear types of IoT devices look like because we might be using them or again considering using them.

9:45But businesses, they tend to focus on things other than just, hey, this is cool or this might be provide useful data. We need to think about things from a revenue, from a cost perspective, and potentially other initiatives as well. And so regardless of what those initiatives are or what the business driver is, they're definitely thinking about things differently than we and IT might think about. When I say they, I mean, our business directors aren't our executives and such. And so as part of the IT staff, we might receive these IoT solutions, but we always need to be thinking about things from the business driver perspective because that will help us to understand why IoT has been decided to be deployed, whether it's a bunch of sensors or trackers or this or that.

10:25And so that can create a dialogue between IT and the business world. And, hey, the more that we can speak to business needs, the more likely our business leaders will come to us and talk to us about the different solutions they're considering rather than just pushing something down at us and expecting us to support it. So ultimately, as-- where we are in IT, we do need to understand things from a technical perspective. But if we can understand things from a business perspective as well, that's going to be really beneficial to us in our careers and in our jobs, again, building those relationships a little bit stronger.

10:57I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to Thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Well, we've reached the end of a skill here. And what we're going to do throughout this course is as we end a skill, we want to do a review to make sure we lock in the knowledge that we talked about. We won't be able to hit on every single detail, but we are going to try to hit up the main concepts from each of the videos to make sure that, once again, we've just got this information all down. So what I encourage you to do is, as we read these questions, to pause the video, and make sure you've taken enough time to see if you can answer it. And if you aren't able to answer it, then maybe go back and review the materials, or review your notes.

0:34And otherwise, if you can check it off, then that's an indication that you've got the necessary information down. So let's go ahead and review these quiz questions together. First and foremost, what differentiates a smart device from a connected device? Well, as we discussed, the smart device is able to make decisions. That's what adds intelligence to a device is taking information and sorting through it and deciding how exactly to react to that information.

1:05A connected device, on the other hand, it's not usually taking information in and making decisions. Instead, we might see that there are certain triggers. Maybe there are alarms or preconfigured values that's going to result in it taking action. We might see that. But for the most part, our connected devices are also focused on maybe just providing information. Maybe they're going to send information to an app on our phone. So we can look at it and interface with it in some way. But again, a truly smart device is going to be focused on being able to make decisions. And it will usually make those decisions based on the outputs from sensors and other components like that.

1:40Question two, what are two downsides to using Wi-Fi for IoT devices? Well, unfortunately for us, even though a lot of us are familiar with Wi-Fi, we've been using it for probably a lot of our IoT careers, ultimately, we can't always use it for IoT. And there's a couple of reasons for that. First of all, we might find that the range isn't sufficient. Wi-Fi has a pretty notoriously short range to it, especially compared to other wireless networking, such as our mobile networks, our cellular towers, things like that.

2:13And then the other big concern is that it is going to require more power consumption than some of the alternatives. And so as we look at some of these other options, the throughput being too limiting is definitely not a factor. Wi-Fi actually gives us an enormous amount of throughput, especially relative to what we need with IoT, which as we said, we don't need much in the way of throughput. The 6 gigahertz being required for IoT devices is not true. In fact, it's quite the opposite. IoT devices don't want to use 6 gigahertz, because it has a lower range. And so what we often find is that if an IoT device is using Wi-Fi, it's going to do so on the 2.4-gigahertz band.

2:46And 2.4 gigahertz offers all kinds of downsides as well, including just how busy it is and how much competition there is in the wireless space. And saying Wi-Fi doesn't support IoT is actually not true either. Wi-Fi does support it. Once again, if it does support it, it's usually 2.4 gigahertz. But ultimately, we might purchase IoT devices that are designed to go onto the Wi-Fi. We just have to be cognizant of the range issue as well as the power issue for our devices. All right, here's our third and last question. Which of the following is a business driver for IoT adoption?

3:22So the key word here is business. We've got to think about things from a business perspective. So we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our managers and our executives. And so when we look at these, the only driver here that could really be tied to business is going to be C, the fact that we could possibly recuperate our costs in a specified time. Remember, we had a word for this, or maybe a phrase for this. It's called Return On Investment, or ROI. We are going to get a return on the investment we're making. Our investment is going to cost us some amount of money. But we will either make that money back or potentially even profit eventually if the revenues continue to grow over the course of time, thanks to our adoption.

3:59Now, everything else we might consider to be reasons to deploy new technology, like the excitement of deploying it. Certainly, we might do that at home-- buy new technology because it looks cool. But we can't say that we are going to do something that has a business value regardless of the cost. As we mentioned, it might not be worth $10,000 a day to save me an hour, and so on and so forth. And then the product getting great reviews should absolutely be a factor. We don't want to deploy a bad product. But we're not going to deploy something just because it gets great reviews, which once again, maybe ties to the excitement of deploying a product.

4:30So once again, let's think about things from a business perspective. And think about revenues and costs and profit but also those business initiatives that might also be driving our decision-making. So with that, this quiz is done. If you couldn't quite make the right decisions when it came to these quiz questions, then be sure to go back and review the materials. And be sure to seal off any knowledge gaps. Otherwise, congratulations on completing Describe Internet of Things, or IoT, Technologies. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.