Talking about cybersecurity first thing in the morning is certainly a wake-up call. You know it, it’s been discussed time and time again: “cybersecurity needs to be at the heart of you IoT strategy.” And it’s not only because of ransomware, which is now making the headlines for obvious reasons: in 2021 there was a ransomware attack every eleven seconds in the world.
The thing is that there are bad guys out there who can make your business life really hard. So, Mark Govan, VP at Trellix, started off the second day at the IoT Solutions World Congress with a serious call to action: Please, ensure that your devices are secure. What’s more, protect your cloud as it’s been the key attack vector lately and it’s typically the weakest point in your digital architecture.
Then, to balance things out, the sessions from Amazon and Siemens went smoothly into how to navigate the chaotic environment we’re living in. Yasser Alsaied reminded the audience that customer satisfaction is a priority. Yet you also need to make sure your operation is solid and focus on what you do best.
Is this the formula for success? Well, in these uncertain times, what is sure, said Aymeric Sarrazin, CEO at Siemens Advanta, is that “we have to understand globalization in a different way,” and that probably means going back to glocalization, a concept combining globalization and localization that was coined in the 80s. By the same token, this will have an impact on sustainability, which was the hot topic of the day.
Sarrazin stated that “technology can make sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable”. A phrase that the speakers of the session on The journey to sustainability through enabling technologies somehow decrypted: “Sustainability is no longer an option but a mandatory requirement,” said Tim Paridaens, Partner at Deloitte Consulting. And it touches all kind of sectors, be they manufacturing Lego pieces or automating lameness evaluation on cows, two use cases that were presented during the day. The key takeaway was the need to avoid the trap of greenwashing.
In that sense, Alicia Asín, CEO and Co-Founder of Libelium wondered whether we’re generating the data we really need and advocated for the need to grow from IoT 1.0 -say the need to have as many sensors as possible-, to IoT 3.0, which focuses on outcomes. In any case, Thomas Kolster, Managing Director at Danfoss, made it clear that there is no trade-off between sustainability and growth. “There are solutions to do both at the same time,” he said. And we need to ensure we can achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), added Asín.
Innovation is certainly a must to achieve those goals, but It’s not easy to harness, as Mark Bryant, from PCL construction, and Nicole Raimundo, CIO of Town of Cary (North Carolina, US), put. What is clear is that “it happens with people first, with people’s ideas,” argued Bryant.
In factories it all boils down to “identifying the main pinpoints and patterns of improvements, the solution framework and scaling technologies,” said Heinrik Sonnenburg, Senior Partner at Siemens Advanta. That may be easier said than done, but as Sultan Aziz, Senior Director Product, Supply and Management at Johnson & Johnson, added: “The future is a configurable manufacturing environment”. And again, the perfect configuration is like the theory of happiness: Despite what philosophers say, everyone has its own. At the end of the day, uncertainty may be creative.