Reading about some the problems we are facing in the Economist I came away feeling that M2M might be the home of the next generation of development on the Internet.
A lot of our friends are in the clouds these days. They want to make the network the home of everything you own. From an ROI perspective this is pretty reasonable. You need to network anyway, so who cares where things are located, right? And if you have networks that have bandwidth which is the promise of 4G and even the wireline world then the cloud is a good move.
However, reading the stories about countries shutting down the networks and the level of sophistication of hacking these days, the use of a successful cloud solution will also draw the interest of hackers.
A honey pot in the clouds is just as sweet as a honey pot on the premise.
However, the attack on the application is not what I am thinking about, I am thinking about the survivability of the network itself.
I expect we could accomplish a level of security-utilizing, peer-to-peer strategies and delivering a self-organizing network that avoids the use of much of the traditional systems. Much of the activity is discussed in the Distributed Computing Industry Association.
In some ways this is easy for M2M like applications since often they have been small networks that are self organized. Expanding these principles to overall self-management across the Internet should become a strategic asset that can create in effect a cloud-like service - minus the cloud's data center.
As I try to describe it the best, analogy I can come up with is munitions development. Munitions normally manage the risk of an accident the goals of economies of scale.
In the cloud we have seen the benefit of the economies of scale, with M2M we should see the benefits of increased distributed processing.
Carl Ford (News - Alert) is a partner at Crossfire Media.Edited by
Marisa Torrieri