A few years ago, “the cloud” was what everyone was talking about in tech – but now that we all agree that ‘cloud’=$someoneelsesseerver, we’ve moved on to the “Internet of Things”. Cisco estimates that 50 billion devices and objects will be connected to the Internet by 2020. And while it may seem like our devices are becoming more and more connected lately, we haven’t scratched the surface. Currently more than 99 percent of things in the physical world remain unconnected (I am holding out for combo USB/Wifi adapters for the pillows on my couch – but that’s another story).

The network infrastructure used to provision, manage, monitor, and monetize these devices will require considerable attention. The connectivity between the IoT sensors and devices and your network will be encrypted to help protect the data, but that might not be enough.  If the infrastructure fails, the consequences could range from a simple annoyance – such as not being able to use an app to turn on heater before the drive home  – to something much worse, like a security threat which could put people at risk for exposure of their personal information.

As more applications are needed to run these devices, scale and reliability are critical. Additional challenges with improving the user experience and the need for faster provisioning of services could swamp Service Providers looking to capitalize on IoT and the services that run on their networks. A scalable and robust infrastructure will be necessary to handle the massive traffic growth over the next several years – and it’s not going to run on spreadsheets and chewing gum.

Internet Plumbing Sidebar: The Domain Name System (DNS), which translates hostnames (like pillow-hotspot1.mycouch.com) into IP addresses (like 123.456.78.9 or 2601:db31:cc4::5), is the most likely method for connected devices to use to locate needed services. However, we cannot assume that people will want to manage DNS servers in-house as this is highly technical as well as a potential security risk. DNS is one of the most critical parts of the Internet infrastructure, so if your DNS goes down, it tends to bring down many other services in your network.

So how do Service Providers bridge infrastructure technologies like DNS with the new usage models and demands of IoT? By centralizing and automating their infrastructure. The good news is that 6connect can help make that happen. ProVision, 6connect’s unique Dynamic Network Provisioning (DNP) platform, uses a robust Connector Library to automate the provisioning of network infrastructure elements.

Now is the time to look into deploying IPv6 if you haven’t already (or dual stack if you want to be specific), as the Internet of Things will be a big driver of this protocol. In fact, the devices that cannot leverage IPv6 will be of limited use in the future as IPv4 resources dwindle even further. The Internet of Things will change how we communicate with our devices and ultimately with each other, so there’s no better time to prepare than right now.