The rapid growth of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and their associated data streams brings with it a completely new discipline of data. The huge amount of data that companies have to process (and store!) from these projects is complicated, dynamic, and usually of a very sensitive nature, so it has to be handled with care. To process such a large amount of data in an effective way, we need to automate the metadata harvesting, and we need to be able to get complete end-to-end data lineage in order to trust our data. So, keep reading. Here are a couple of MANTA x IoT use cases we have drafted for you!

IoT & Smart Homes

There are buildings that can collect information about their neighborhoods as well as smart homes that connect appliances to mobile phones – monitoring your fridge and adding groceries to your shopping list, heating your rooms and plenty of other activities that make up your daily life – this is the concept of a smart home. But then at the end of the day, you have a bundle of very personal information about your customers’ lives that is all collected in a company DWH and/or in a “cloud far, far away”. This data will come with the need to comply with regulations for personal data. This could be compliance with GDPR or even HIPAA in some cases, if the data includes information that could indicate the customer’s health status (e.g. if the home is barrier-free, there is a special medication device installed, what food is in the fridge).

IoT & Healthcare

With HIPAA and other regulations, healthcare is one of the most monitored industries in the world, and for good reason! It will only get harder to comply with these regulations, especially with the desire to digitalize all customer records and add IoT concepts that integrate data from wearable sensors. These wearables usually sync data in real time as well, giving doctors the ability to remotely monitor patients. This makes them a real-time security threat for medical experts, doctors, insurance providers, you name it! In the worst-case scenario, if there would happen to be a data breach, the healthcare provider would have to prove that it did everything humanly possible to stop it! Data lineage is a way of showing that as well.

IoT & Finance

IoT can be incorporated into the finance industry through a broad variety of payment methods, virtual payment methods, apps, microchip technology, cards, sensors, and so on. The data collected from these payment methods can also be used, for example, to calculate individualized rates for term-based insurance or other financial products/services that can adapt to a person’s real-world behavior rather than an estimated mathematical model. But, as if companies working in finance didn’t already have enough data, all of these concepts dramatically increase the content of company data warehouses.

IoT & Retail

IoT locating technologies and on-product sensors could enhance the customer shopping experience by sending instant personalized promotions, sharing reviews from other customers, and offering remote payment options. A future model could offer a hands-free shopping process, and even current ones would also be able to track customers’ moves through the aisles, their ideal “shopping path”. Microchips or sensors inside goods could also help the company create an automatic on/off -stocking process, which would leave the company to deal with a never-ending flow of new information into their data warehouses.

IoT & Utilities

Networks of connected sensors among household appliances and devices would be able to regulate the amount of electricity that is being used in the home, autonomously control a building or home’s energy consumption, and optimize intake. On a bigger scale, this should also help optimize large-scale energy grids.

Conclusion: IoT & Data Lineage

IoT is a data-driven concept, and all data-driven concepts have exactly the same problem: their data needs special attention! That includes precisely tracking their data as well as having complete end-to-end data lineage that is, preferably, completely automated – because the amount of data that floods company DWHs after implementing an IoT solution is insane! And no company has the kind of time and employees necessary to manually reconstruct data lineage from that many sources, right?

MANTA can enable your company to prove exactly where your data is, where it is going, and how it is treated along the way. This can mean the difference between complying with a regulation, gaining a happy customer – or putting your data at risk. Although living on the edge is exciting, that does not apply to your data, ever!

Ready to learn more? Leave us a note in the form or let us know via email at manta@getmanta.com.