What is the Internet of Things (IoT)?
Overview
Internet of Things
What is an example of IoT in action?
Consider a truck that communicates the location and temperature of goods in transit, helping logistics teams ensure timely delivery and protect perishable items. Or a factory pump that senses when it’s about to fail and automatically triggers a maintenance alert, preventing costly downtime. That’s the Internet of Things in action, where connected devices generate real-time insights that drive smarter decisions.
IoT helps businesses monitor performance, predict issues before they occur, reduce manual tasks, and respond more quickly to changing conditions. Whether it’s tracking energy usage in a smart building, monitoring inventory in a warehouse, or optimizing routes for delivery vehicles, IoT makes it possible to act on data as it happens, boosting efficiency, improving safety, and supporting proactive operations across industries.
Why is IoT important to enterprises?
IoT delivers businesses real-time information from the edge of their operations, turning data into actionable insights, choices, and results. It supports organizations by connecting assets, infrastructure, and environments. With real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance can help you cut down on unplanned downtime by:
- Keeping an eye on the status of your assets and optimizing their performance to make them last longer.
- Improving visibility along the supply chain, from raw materials to delivery at the last mile.
- Using AI-powered analytics to make sense of IoT data and speed up decision-making.
- Allowing innovative ideas to come to life and open up new ways to generate revenue, such as subscription-based or usage-based services.
IoT helps businesses in manufacturing, logistics, energy, healthcare, and retail lower risk, make operations more efficient, and fulfill customers' growing demands for speed and transparency.
How does IoT work?
Several important parts of IoT ecosystems work together to turn data from the real world into digital insights and actions:
- Devices and sensors: These are built into physical items like machinery, cars, buildings, and more to gather real-time information about conditions like temperature, vibration, humidity, speed, pressure, and more.
- Connectivity layer: Devices deliver data to the cloud or edge systems across networks like Wi-Fi, cellular (3G, 4G, 5G), Bluetooth, or LPWAN.
- Edge or cloud platforms: Data is collected, cleansed, and analyzed either on the edge (for speed) or in centralized cloud platforms (for scale).
- Applications and AI models: These use AI to create dashboards, analytics, alerts, and even start automated workflows and make decisions.
OpenText™ Aviator IoT combines all these layers together in one platform. It collects and analyzes data from connected assets, enabling enterprise workflows to act on insights in real time.
What is the difference between IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT)?
IoT is a broader term that includes linking physical things to the internet, such as smart home systems, wearables, and corporate applications. Industrial IoT (IIoT) is a specific type of IoT that focuses on systems that are mission critical in fields like:
- Manufacturing and production
- Services
- Oil and gas
- Power
- Transportation and logistics
IIoT solutions must meet strict requirements for uptime, compliance, and working with older industrial systems like SCADA, MES, PLCs, and ERP. While consumer IoT primarily focuses on convenience and ease of use, IIoT is centered on enhancing safety, efficiency, and operational resilience.
What are some real-world uses for IoT?
There are many real-world uses for IoT, including:
- Healthcare: Wearables that work with the Internet of Things can keep track of heart rate, oxygen levels, and more, giving doctors access to patient data at all times—even from a distance.
- Manufacturing: Predictive analytics can find early symptoms of deterioration on equipment, which helps reduce expensive downtime and allows for proactive maintenance.
- Logistics: GPS and environmental sensors keep an eye on items in real time, ensuring they follow the cold chain and don't get stolen.
- Retail: Smart shelves and RFID tags aid with inventory and refilling in stores, and IoT cameras help make the consumer experience more personal.
- Utilities: Smart meters monitor how much energy is being used and make the system work better.
These technologies do more than just collect data—they also help you make better decisions, automate more tasks, and find new ways to expand.
What are the challenges of implementing IoT?
IoT offers transformative potential, but it also introduces significant complexity. As organizations scale their use of connected devices, several challenges often arise:
- Security vulnerabilities: Every connected device represents a potential entry point for cyberattacks. Ensuring device authentication, encryption, secure communication, and lifecycle management is essential to safeguard sensitive operational data and prevent breaches.
- Data volume and complexity: IoT sensors generate massive amounts of real-time data. Without the right infrastructure to ingest, filter, store, and analyze this data effectively, organizations can quickly become overwhelmed, which can lead to undermining the very insights they seek to unlock.
- Legacy system integration: Many enterprises still rely on aging infrastructure and applications that were not built to support IoT connectivity. Bridging the gap between modern IoT platforms and legacy systems is often a major roadblock to realizing full operational value.
- Cost and scalability: Deploying edge infrastructure, ensuring secure data transmission, and managing thousands of connected endpoints requires upfront investment and long-term scalability planning, especially in industrial environments.
OpenText addresses these challenges with a secure, modular IoT platform built for enterprise needs. It supports seamless integration with legacy systems, enables data-driven decision-making at scale, and delivers measurable ROI through outcome-based use cases in manufacturing, logistics, energy, and beyond. With OpenText, organizations can simplify complexity and accelerate digital transformation with confidence.
How does IoT impact cybersecurity?
IoT expands an organization’s digital footprint, which increases the potential attack surface for cyber threats. Each connected device introduces a new point of entry that must be secured. As a result, cybersecurity must be a foundational element of any IoT strategy. Some of the most critical security concerns include:
- Device spoofing and hijacking: Attackers can impersonate legitimate devices or take control of them to manipulate operations, disrupt services, or exfiltrate data.
- Unencrypted communication: If data transmitted between devices and systems is not encrypted, it becomes vulnerable to interception, tampering, or theft.
- Inadequate patch and update management: Many IoT devices are deployed in the field for long periods. Without a robust method to update firmware and apply security patches, these devices can become easy targets for attackers.
- Unauthorized access to operational technology (OT): Insecure or misconfigured IoT deployments can expose critical OT systems, such as industrial controllers or monitoring equipment, to unauthorized users. This can lead to safety risks, service interruptions, or regulatory non-compliance.
To mitigate these risks, organizations must implement strong authentication, encrypted communications, centralized device management, and regular monitoring of their IoT environment.
What industries benefit most from IoT?
IoT can be applied across a wide range of industries, but some sectors are realizing greater value and faster returns due to the nature of their operations and the scale of their connected assets. Key examples include:
- Manufacturing: IoT enables manufacturers to improve overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by tracking machine performance in real time. It helps prevent unplanned downtime through predictive maintenance and supports automated quality control by detecting defects or irregularities during production.
- Healthcare: Connected medical devices allow for continuous patient monitoring, which improves early detection of health issues and supports proactive care. IoT also enables telehealth services, remote diagnostics, and predictive analytics to support clinical decision-making and resource planning.
- Energy and utilities: Utility companies use IoT to optimize grid performance, monitor energy usage patterns, and detect outages or faults faster. By analyzing sensor data, they can reduce the need for on-site inspections and improve response times to service disruptions.
- Logistics and transportation: Fleet operators use IoT to monitor vehicle health, fuel efficiency, and driver behavior. Sensors also track the condition of goods in transit, such as temperature or humidity, and help optimize delivery routes based on traffic or environmental conditions.
- Retail: IoT helps retailers enhance the customer experience by enabling real-time inventory tracking, automated restocking, and personalized promotions. Predictive analytics based on sensor data supports better demand forecasting and product placement.
What is the future of IoT?
IoT is playing a central role in digital transformation across industries. Its future lies in the convergence with emerging technologies that enable organizations to move beyond connectivity and into intelligent, action-driven systems.
One key trend is the integration of artificial intelligence with IoT, often referred to as AIoT. This allows data to be processed and analyzed directly at the edge, where devices are located. Instead of simply collecting information, these systems can identify patterns, make decisions, and trigger actions in real time, all without needing to send data back to a central system.
Another advancement is the growing use of digital twins. These are virtual models of real-world assets, processes, or systems that use real-time IoT data to simulate behavior. Digital twins allow businesses to test different scenarios, optimize operations, and anticipate problems before they occur.
The rollout of 5G and the expansion of edge computing are also shaping the future of IoT. With ultra-low latency and high bandwidth, 5G enables devices to communicate and process data faster and more efficiently. Edge computing ensures that data can be handled closer to where it is generated, reducing delays and easing the burden on centralized systems.
Sustainability is another area where IoT is making a significant impact. Organizations are increasingly using connected devices to monitor emissions, energy consumption, and other environmental metrics in real time. This helps companies track progress against ESG goals and meet regulatory requirements.
OpenText Aviator IoT is uniquely positioned to help organizations harness these advancements. It enables businesses to use IoT as a decision infrastructure—built not just for collecting data, but for driving intelligent action across complex, distributed environments. As companies shift from connected to cognitive systems, OpenText provides the foundation for scalable, secure, and outcome-driven innovation.
How can OpenText help with IoT?
The advent of AI-enabled, IoT-connected devices is reshaping organizations’ operational dynamics and service delivery. It introduces a new tier of data and asset visibility, while adding thousands of devices to networks and exponentially increasing the endpoints to manage.
OpenText Aviator IoT leverages AI to simplify device provisioning, management, data ingestion, and handling, as well as correlate IoT master data with existing data. It also incorporates IoT business protocols into back-end systems and establishes a secure digital ecosystem. With OpenText Aviator IoT, businesses benefit from:
- Real-time coordination of data from physical assets to digital processes.
- Traceability that meets compliance standards, includes event records, metadata, and audit trails.
- Agentic automation, where AI incorporated into systems finds problems and takes action on its own, without any human intervention.
- Enterprise-wide integration links IoT signals to content management systems, supply chain activities, and main business platforms.
