It’s never our plan, but complexity sneaks up on you. Corporate IT is notorious for this—and the truth is that the complex beast that enterprise IT has become has kept quite a few tech staffers gainfully employed through the years. All those point solutions and DIY systems can’t update and configure themselves!
At times, it’s like being trapped in an inadvertent Rube Goldberg machine, with so many dependencies built up over the years that even simple tasks become complicated. And the situation would be as funny as Goldberg’s satirical comics if it wasn’t so painful to endure.
The road to becoming a Rube Goldberg IT environment is paved with the best of intentions, sprinkled with a few end-run home-grown projects and a smattering of rogue apps customized to meet a department’s wish list.
But the scattershot, decentralized approach to IT makes managing, updating, configuring, and reconfiguring all those moving parts a time-consuming nightmare. And as more organizations look for ways to harness the data and potential of the Internet of Things, the range of devices and applications will multiply, and the quantity of data will grow exponentially. Which has the potential to make a Rube Goldberg machine look simple in comparison.
Establish IoT, Mobile Strategies
So how can an enterprise keep its IT department from becoming one that must (to quote Goldberg, who was born on July 4, 1883) “go to a great extreme to accomplish very little”—especially in the era of IoT?
“It’s important for the executive level to set direction of how the company will attack IoT, as well as mobile,” says Stephen Chin, lead Java community manager at the Oracle Technology Network.
That strategy needs to go down to the technical level, to ensure that the organization doesn’t build a bunch of silos that make sharing data and even doing run-of-the-mill maintenance more difficult and complex.
For example, Chin says, “technical people are often tempted to build things themselves rather than use existing platforms and applications, and by going the DIY route they can introduce issues that could have been avoided.”
But tested and proven cloud solutions provide a number of advantages over the build-your-own approach, he says—especially in the era of IoT. Those advantages include:
- Secure communication between IoT devices and the cloud.
- Data architecture that provides secure storage.
- Reliable transport of data so information is not lost.
But if departments create or buy the technology for each of those areas independently, the business makes itself potentially vulnerable to a range of security breaches and functional (or perhaps dysfunctional) headaches over time.
Java Security
“What hackers often look for is technology that has known security holes that have not been updated,” Chin says. “That’s why in the IoT world, all of the work that’s gone into making Java a secure platform is a huge benefit.”
From a maintenance standpoint, an IoT environment consisting of technologies with different protocols and APIs that have not been tested together—and without consideration for how they might need to interact in the future—quickly becomes a lot of configuration work with each new software update. It is also a growing security and downtime risk.
As data increasingly becomes a form of capital in today’s business world, the risks of security breaches and downtime loom larger than ever. From a strategic standpoint, technology choices made today can have a big effect on an organization’s future, Chin points out.
If a business sets up its IoT systems on a customized platform, it may not be able to share that data with a partner down the line—and that might limit its options down the road.
Says Chin: “Technology based on interoperable standards that enable departments and even organizations to share and work together will be a distinct advantage.”
(Forbes)
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