How IoT And Edge Computing Influence Various Industries

From healthcare to lifestyle, everything is being influenced by emerging technologies like IoT and edge computing. Moreover, as data remains the foundation of today’s economy, businesses can use these emerging technologies to offer a more personalized experience to their customers.

The major benefit of IoT and edge computing is the capability to process, compute, and analyze data with the same quality as that in the cloud, without any latency!

Together, IoT and Edge Computing strive to sway the industry by planning to add more than 6 billion new connected devices every year. Here’s a list of Edge Computing and IoT trends as well as statistics that show the fledgling growth of these technologies in this modern era:

• According to a recent survey by Redhat, enterprises are likely to spend an estimation of 30% of their IT budget on edge computing over the coming years.
• According to a case study by Gartner, nearly three-quarters of data generated by enterprises will be processed and created at the edge by 2025.
• As per a report by GSMA Intelligence, the estimated global IoT revenue after the effects of the pandemic is $381 billion as of December 2020.

The figures certainly prove that these technologies are changing the way we live. However, if the number game doesn’t work for you, here are some real-life use cases of IoT and Edge Computing that help you understand how these technologies are impacting the world:

Manufacturing Industry

The manufacturing industry is full of machinery and heavy equipment that involves numerous moving parts. This makes it important to know what’s happening where in manufacturing. A lot of IoT and Edge Computing organizations like AWS, Honeywell, and Siemens Digital Software are contributing towards a change for industrial manufacturers by capitalizing data from their sensors placed around the premises of the factory. 

The sensors allow manufacturers to understand the purpose of machines and predict maintenance requirements that reduce the likelihood of downtime. With these technologies, companies can enjoy higher employee productivity and identify problems faster. As the world begins to adopt it, the manufacturing industry will be revolutionized properly.

Logistics and Transportation Industry

It can’t be emphasized more that IoT, followed by Edge Computing will certainly be a significant driver in the growth of the logistics and transportation industry. Talking about some of the practical use cases, it includes using sensors and micro-devices to track the products being transported, delivered, and shipped. 

The technologies can be used to track all means of transportations such as train, truck, boat, and plane. It can also be used as a network of connected vehicles that offer communication assistance on the behalf of the driver or to the driver. Another use case may include planning, monitoring, and routing municipal vehicle planning for waste disposal. These technologies are also effective for location-awareness and fleet tracking, and also help in the maintenance of vehicles on the road preventively.

Supply Chain

Edge Computing and IoT provide a substantial growth opportunity for the supply chain with the help of data, even when the supply chain is known as the by-product of virtually every industry. If you’re looking to monitor certain aspects of your business, from monetary growth to inventory management, you may already know how helpful and convenient it can be to have real-time data and analytics that help you optimize each step of your supply chain. It can also help in removing any friction in the supply chain that results in higher customer retention and lesser operational expenses. 

As the pandemic brought nearly every business to a standstill because of potential weakness in the supply chain, the world understood how important it is to process data in the right way. Organizations must have great visibility in the supply chain to meet the demand of consumers for a high-supply product.

Retail Industry

With the growing capabilities of IoT and Edge Computing, any industry where transactions happen between a consumer and provider can be improvised. Whether it’s a pop-up kiosk or a brick-and-mortar store, these emerging technologies can certainly flourish. Moreover, IoT is already impacting the retail sector, intending to enhance customer experience and reduce sales costs. 

Some of the typical use cases may include tracking of assets like supply chain optimization, loss control, and inventory control. Moreover, it also helps in cold storage monitoring for inventory that consists of perishable items. It can also be used for targeted advertising that may involve using proximity to locate potential or known customers and gain information about sales.

Healthcare Industry

The health services industry will compete for the top spot with manufacturing and logistics industry in revenue and impact on IoT. Any system that improves the quality of life and decreases health costs are a top concern in practically every developed country. The IoT is ready to take into consideration for the distant and flexible monitoring of patients wherever they might be.

Edge computing offers exciting opportunities for bringing patient care. With IoT devices equipped for supplying huge measures of patient-generated health data (PGHD), medical care providers could actually have access to the important data about their patients in real time instead of interfacing with slow and inadequate databases.

Edge computing could have a huge effect on the delivery of medic-care services to hard-to-reach rural areas. For example, patients in these areas are mostly miles away from the closest health center and even when a medical professional assesses them on-site, they will be unable to get to significant medical records. With edge computing, the devices could accumulate, store, and deliver that data in real time, and even utilize their processing abilities to suggest treatments and medications.

Financial Sector

Banking areas are receiving edge computing in combination with smartphone apps to target services to clients. They're also joining similar standards to give ATMs and kiosks the capacity to accumulate and process information, making them more responsive and permitting them to offer an extensive suit of features.

For high-volume accounting firms that deal in hedge funds and other business, even a millisecond of lag in a trading algorithm computation can mean a considerable loss of cash. Edge computing architecture allows them to place servers in data centers near stock trades around the globe to run resource intensive algorithms as near to the information as could be expected. This furnishes them with the most precise and cutting-edge data to keep their business moving.

The Takeaway

Edge Computing and IoT trends are not new to the world. On the contrary, it’s even more mainstream than people consider it to be. As it progresses to get better, along with other revolutionary technologies like AI and ML, businesses will see more ways to grow their operations.

Previously published at https://appinventiv.com/blog/iot-trends/