TORONTO – The volume of data being generated by the Internet of things is “mind boggling” and “transforms literally everything”, said Alec Saunders, vice-president of Blackberry’s QNX Cloud Business division, speaking during a Canadian Telecom Summit panel titled “Cloud, Big Data and the Transformative Power of the Network” on Monday.
“We’re seeing usage of data in all kinds of analytics scenarios that people didn’t really think about when they were collecting the data,” Saunders said, adding the challenge for companies is being able to use and share that data in meaningful ways.
He gave the example of an industrial lighting manufacturer in Boston whose products have built-in sensors to detect the presence of people, or lack thereof, to enable the lights to be shut off automatically when not needed. One of the lighting manufacturer’s customers, Ace Hardware, is now using this people-sensing capability to determine the foot traffic patterns in its stores, which in turn is allowing Ace Hardware to charge vendors higher prices for shelf placement in high-traffic aisles.
Based on his recent discussions with one of the big three auto manufacturers, Saunders said the quantity of data generated by just a single car’s computer systems could amount to 3 or 4 gigabytes of data per month. “Multiply that by hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road – and we’re just talking about vehicles – you’re talking about exabytes of data being generated on a monthly basis,” he added. “If you start to project that out to 50 billion (devices in the Internet of things), now you’re talking about exabytes of data being generated on a daily basis and potentially trillions of machine transactions being executed on a daily basis.” Versions of QNX software can be found aboard hundreds of thousands of vehicles already on the road.
Jeremy Wubs, vice-president of product management for Bell Canada, said the infrastructure for the Internet of things needs to incorporate carrier-grade design elements, such as flexibility, upstream security and network intelligence. However, he said Bell and the telecom industry in general is still “fairly early in the journey,” of deploying cloud infrastructure in its networks. “There’s a big transformation required in the assets of these service providers, ourselves included. We have 10,000 or so voice remotes, as an example, across the country. To say I’m going to immediately transform or over a short period of time transform 10,000 remotes into a different architecture…consolidate them, that has a pretty big impact on the potential to cause an outage or to impact service. So it’s a big scale problem to figure out,” he explained.
“The one thing that you can’t do is violate the trust of the consumer, but we know that consumers will give up privacy in exchange for some benefit, and that’s a piece that the industry has to keep in mind as we go down this path.” – Alex Saunders, BlackBerry
Scott Hoffpauir, chief technology officer of unified communications software developer Broadsoft, said many of his company’s customers are taking a single-vendor approach to deploying cloud infrastructure. “A number of our customers now are settling on a particular vendor for cloud infrastructure, so all of the networking, computing, storage and all of the different applications that are going to use that infrastructure,” he said.
Hoffpauir added he thinks it will still be another year before Broadsoft’s “real-time intensive” unified communications applications can be comfortably put in a pure NFV (network functions virtualization) environment. “But without a doubt, that’s the future. And really, I think it’s all about just making it more cost-effective and easier to run the data centres and run the equipment on a day-to-day basis.”
Wubs said Bell is also hearing from its customers they want a single provider to broker services and to create a simpler interface to the cloud. “I would love to have lots of partnerships, but you can only do so many, well… So, pick the set of partners, go deeper in the relationships, and create a broader set of offers that have a kind of single interface to it,” he said.
When the issues of security and privacy in the cloud were raised by a member of the audience, Saunders acknowledged there have been a number of security breaches online recently, such as car manufacturer Tesla’s web site being hacked, allowing the hacker to remotely open car doors. Other examples cited by Saunders include web-connected baby monitors being taken over remotely, and a botnet residing in Internet-connected refrigerators.
“I see these things as being vectors that hackers have exploited, where security wasn’t well understood by the implementers…As time goes on, companies will develop reputations for having good security or bad security,” Saunders said.
“I think the bigger challenge is privacy and educating consumers on what will be done with the data,” he said. “The one thing that you can’t do is violate the trust of the consumer, but we know that consumers will give up privacy in exchange for some benefit, and that’s a piece that the industry has to keep in mind as we go down this path.”
