The speed with which electronics technology develops means it's always a good time for product developers. More capable devices available for less cost allow designers to be more innovative, while support software is helping them to get those products to market on or even ahead of schedule. Many of those designers - and readers of Outlook 2016 - will be looking to create products for the Internet of Things, or IoT. Despite the fact there remains a healthy discussion about what the term IoT actually represents, most will agree that there exists a huge opportunity for companies of all sizes to create devices that sense 'something' and transmit that data to The Cloud. Often battery powered, these so called 'edge devices' need to consume as little power as possible, whilst retaining the ability to do some processing and to then transmit that data via wired or wireless communications to a gateway. The gateway then aggregates the input from a number of edge devices and sends it on to servers in The Cloud for analysis and the generation of some kind of output. All the way along this link from the edge to the heart of the network, there is the need to protect against unauthorised intrusions.
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