Dear Mr. David

I think the following may be the challenges what we are facing with respect to IoT.

Ubiquitous connectivity - Many of the places we still lack a  good internet connectivity to enable reliable IoT connections.

Security or Trustability - Still people are afraid to put their private data into a public domain. Are these data or information really secured? "I am still in doubt!!!!". Are we sure our private data is not been read or seen by any supreme authority??? ... So trust matters a lot....

Interoperability - May be we can say that it is easy to make interoperable since we have the open source kernels or OS is available in the market. But still one question how many of us are really using open source things. Percentage is less i guess.. Since most of the IOT applications are Smartphone based, we can make the applications run on any platforms.. For e.g. if u consider the case of Android and IOS we can see the difference. One another things is more than 400 standards for IoT communication. These not only cover network-level connectivity (ranging from LTE-M in the cellular world to more familiar technologies like Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN and Zigbee), but importantly, also standardized data formats. Once that is in place, vendors can develop solutions that customers can mix and match rather than isolated silos. This does not only lower development cost for the vendor but makes it future proof for the customer. Standards will probably emerge in various domains such as energy, health, mobility, and smart home at different points in time.

Lack of role models - I guess still IOT lacks a role model application which is used by more than 70% of the people in this world. 

Adaptability - How many of us are really adaptable to changes in the market. Count is less right?? well that may also be a challenge in this scenario.. How many years it took for the concept of Mobile Commerce to become really into existence.. IoT technology needs to be adaptable: it needs to cater for the widest possible range of applications. Return on Investment (ROI) is also questionable with respect to IOT i feel. 

IoT needs to be made easy for inexperienced developers.... 

Another challenge is power management. That we should not forget at all.. Whether the current research is enough for us to make these IOT things awake always??

So challenges are many according to my opinion... We may have adapt it or the "Things"  what we build have to get adapt with us.... !!!!! debatable... 

https://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/thinkinnovate/archive/2016/02/02/the-top-6-challenges-facing-iot-and-how-we-are-overcoming-them

Good Question and Thanks for letting me answering or thinking about this..

Thanks and Regards

Sanoop M. 

Thank you Sanoop for very good points. I agree with most of them. I would think that connectivity should not be a big issue for IoT since most platforms operate with wireless over short distances. WiFi, Bluetooth, and other state-of-the-art short range communication options should be good enough.

I think your interoperability point is a great one. There are a lot of IoT players out there, and everyone wants to be the next major IoT platform. So it's hard to find common grounds in terms of standards.

Security is also a huge issue. Would you believe that many platforms are still sending passwords in plain text during WiFi association?

Dear David I will tell you one example scenario regarding Yahoo. One of the best email providers all over the world. Still over a LAN connectivity we can see the password of the user who uses yahoo mail service by using the packet tracer software "wireshark". They are not encrypting the password over the LAN connectivity. You just have to monitor the IP address of the victims system whom you are going to hack. The trace of the packet after entering the user name and password when we press the sign in button it is sending without encrypting. But gmail does encryption and sends the packet. But still by using the wireshark if you find the particular packet trace session after the victim pressing the sign in button, just paste it on ur browser in your system it enters to your victims gmail (if he had not logged out by that time).

But as you said, it is difficult over a Wifi association. Most of the cases even if we are not applying any encryption over the data, the end to end system may do it for us (for eg. bluetooth or GSM-end to-end devices are encrypting the data before sending). But how can we believe this end-to-end system? I dont know whether my point is correct or not. Does it make any sense?

I see your points, Sanoop. Great discussion :) Thanks!

Dear David,

The discussion points been good, but the biggest problem today is on the Wireless communication options.

 Roughly as I write this there are 12 wireless options each one having its own technology merit and every option undermining the other to gain a competetive advantage over the choice of a unified option.

If Internet of Things have to be globally adopted then we need to have a common agreeable standard ( like the adoption of WIFI) or the cellular standards.  

With multiple options and segmentation of the markets geographically , adoption of the same will really be a real challenge.

Bi-directional communication is to a be minimum requirement, security cannot be compromised, and with less than 0.30 cents a chip/microcontroller there will be limitation to the technology. 

It's high time that IoT pundits across the globe create a unified vision to address the various challenges  for a booming  connected devices.

While we hope to have a 50 billion devices connected by 2020 0r by 2050 , I definitely see that there will be a booming market for  "Security for IOT" .

Great points, Deepak! Thank you for your thoughts!

Security and privacy is a big challenges in IoT