How Blockchain Can Revolutionize IoT

As technology changes the way we live our day-to-day lives, it is fascinating to imagine what the future will bring. We live in the age where we are soon going to be surrounded by disruptive technologies like Blockchain, IoT, Machine Learning, AR/VR, etc. You will unleash the power and potential of these technologies to see your lives changing by leap and bounds, but it will not happen in a fortnight.

Though all these technologies have seen a few implementations, IoT has been the most prominent of them all to date. Considering the predictions from Gartner, there will be more than 20 billion connected things by 2020. This is a huge number. The Internet of Things is rapidly expanding its potential to transform everyday life with connected cars, smart homes, connected wearables, smart cities, farms, and manufacturing facilities. The possibilities are endless, and development is already taking place, however, the current Internet infrastructure is unlikely to be able to support this IoT revolution.

With so many devices connected to each other through the internet, management and security are a big concern. In research by IDC, the firm estimates that 90% of the organizations that implement the Internet of Things will suffer an IoT-based breach of the back-end system by 2017.

The current IoT ecosystem works on a centralized communication and data management model, which is also known as a client/server paradigm. All IoT-enabled devices are connected to each other through a cloud that allows storage and processing of the data. Connection to these devices go through the internet, and with so much happening on a server, it can be overloaded, making the entire system vulnerable to cyber-attack. Even if you use large server farms, this remains a possibility.

If we take the discussion to smart homes, this is again relevant and the probability would be even higher. For smart homes to function well on IoT, they would have a small server set up locally. It would then be easy for a hacker to take control of it, exposing every bit of your personal information.