Intel’s colorful take on the Internet of Things

There are many numbers thrown around with the concept of the Internet of Things: some10 billion devices are connected today, by 2020, that number could grow to over 31 billion devices and 4 billion people. Some estimates are going even higher as the talk transitions from an Internet of Things to the Internet of Everything.

What’s the difference? That was the subject of an article by Cisco Chief Futurist Dave Evans. The Internet of Things is just that — machines connected to machines (M2M). Smart phones, smart thermostats, cars, trains, farm equipment… you name it. Billions of devices sending and receiving information over the Internet enabling all kinds of new and wondrous functionality that is already re-shaping the way the world works.

The Internet of Everything is defined as expanding on the Internet of Things to add additional pillars for people, data and process. Cisco estimating this new more encompassing definition might hit 50 billion people, data and things by 2020.

What does all this mean for the average network administrator? For one, it’s time to make sure you are only working on really important stuff. Automate what you can because as your workplace network becomes even more critical to connect things, people and data, there will be new challenges and even less time to do anything but the most complicated tasks manually.

Uplogix is really straddling multiple pillars of the Internet of Everything. On one hand, our Local Managers are machines that are monitoring and managing other machines and generating data sent back to the Uplogix Control Center. (Although, remember that our primary connections to managed devices are via a console connection, so they aren’t network and Internet dependent!). On the other hand, Uplogix provides connections for human administrators to access remote devices as if they were there in person.

So, get out into the world before it’s totally connected. In just the couple of minutes it’s probably taken to read this post, over 185,000 HOURS of video was watched on YouTube, 700 photos were uploaded to Instagram, over 6 BILLION emails went out, and a hundred thousand new devices just logged on to the Internet for the first time.