‘Internet of Things (IoT)’ doesn’t need an introduction. It has enabled industrial sensors, workspace control programs, wearable gadgets,and other countless products to connect to the internet, and to each other,allowing them to create and share data every second of the day.NASSCOM report on IoT landscape supports the fact thatIndia will be a front runner in IoT adoption inAsia Pacific (APAC) – theIoT market size in Indiais expected to grow at rate of 62% CAGR andreach US$9 billion by 2020.

IoT systems offers tremendous benefits in terms of productivity, performance and cost savings. Despite the benefits and the latest trends that IoT has witnessed, there are a few challenges that need to be addressed. Often, these challenges lead to projects not getting enough mileage or are stuck at initial phases of implementation.

For the industry to truly take off, here are the key challenges that businesses must tackle:

The Art of Data Integration
The most prominent problem businesses face when transitioning to IoT is the idea of data silos. Simply put, if data remains in a void, it will bring zero value to an organization. Everything organizations do today revolves around customer experience. For example, in an organization, if the sales department does not have access to the marketing data, they will not be able to create strategies that will benefit the end consumer. Businesses must realize the potential of integrating different types of customer data to improve customer loyalty.

Organizations usually have two options available when facing the task of data integration: buying or creating new end-to-end systems or integrate IoT technology into their existing infrastructure.

Here IoT embedded solutions play a key role as they are cost effective and provide results that the former approach cannot garner. For organizations to become smarter, organizations must integrate data from existing systems, whether it is about business applications, legacy systems, machine data, or any other system.

The Value of Data Quality, Filtering and Enrichment
Implications of poor data quality can often be terrible is an understatement. Incorrect and delay in output or decisions, capital expenditure and rise in distrust between departments, are a few issues that might occur due to poor data.

Big data - and, as a result, the Internet of Things only further amplifies this challenge. However, having a right data integrator can help businesses have clean data generated by IoT, and can further enrich and manage that data simultaneously. For example, data generated from social media is usually difficult to be understood in its raw form, even by the savviest marketing managers, due to its unstructured form.

Similarly, a data quality tool can help generate real-time alerts on mission-critical data discrepancies and other problems at hand. This enables business leaders to resolve small scale issues before they become bigger in the future.

The Power of Analytics
All that data in meaningless if we can’t derive insights from it. Analytics has a key role to play in growth and success of IoT applications and investment. Deriving insights and presenting it in a suitable manner is the most beneficial and challenging part after integration, filtering and enrichment of the data. Once you have an accurate analytics solution in the organization, it would simplify the processes and fasten the decision-making processes as the decision-makers have access to real-time data.

Contrary to current understanding, analytics is more about than just ‘making sense of data’.It's about cutting through the large amounts of noise being generated by IoT, allowing insight and action to rise to the surface. It's about processing data and making it available at all levels of an organizations on a real-time basis. It is also about a transparency in operations, having the ability to check what is going on with a granular focus. This enables to make better, quicker and more informed decisions that garner positive results.

IoT has revolutionized businesses and still for many organizations its implementation is indeed a challenge and should not be taken for granted. However, looking at a bigger picture, its advantages outweigh the potential downsides. The ability to extract value from big data through smart analytics is key to business success. By implementing IoT enabled systems, businesses can build effective frameworks that allow them to follow and deliver customer-centric strategies.