When most people think of the Internet of Things (IoT), home automation is what comes to mind. But in terms of complexity, home automation is a simple network compared with applications in “smart” cities, huge manufacturing facilities, and eventually connecting everything necessary to enable vehicle autonomy.
However, IoT may have some of its greatest impact on the utilities market and others considered mission-critical. They have been using supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for decades to monitor and control far-flung assets of industrial, government, energy, and other industries. IoT and SCADA are different in many ways, but the former is so all-encompassing it’s certain to influence SCADA. The question now is how.