IoT is Taking Over with New Wireless Hub Technology

The time has come; all of our smart house dreams and fears are about to be realized with the announcement of yet another wireless hub this time from Samsung at the IFA 2015. We’ve written about OnHub, Google’s contribution and what it means for the future of Wi-Fi, but the topic seems to be cropping up everywhere. These “wireless routers” are positioning themselves to be staples in houses and businesses of the future.

These hubs aim to be the anchors in the future world of IoT immersion, where talking to yourself will no longer seem odd. Amazon has released ads for their hub: Amazon Echo. These hubs will not only connect your phones, computers and televisions to the internet, they will also be compatible with appliances, wearables and other IoT devices that are bound to become more common in the coming years. Connecting appliances to your IoT network, as silly as it sounds, is actually brilliant. Things like washers, dryers and refrigerators are a pain to fix when they break, and we all know the rules of threes; your washer goes immediately followed by the dryer and the water heater. Getting an alert from your refrigerator that says, “Hey, somethings not right, I think I have a problem,” will save you time, money and groceries.

I digress: these hubs will become staples in every business, allowing you to interact with your network like it’s a person. Although these hubs aren’t at enterprise level yet, the next logical step would be to build these hubs on a much larger scale. Think about having a hub that you could talk to being a liaison consolidating all of your enterprise solutions. Your cloud, IAM, MDM, SIEM and BI solutions could all talk communicate, sending data to each other like a system of checks and balances.

Even a few months ago hubs seemed like something that could happen, but I never really gave it much thought. With these new releases from Amazon, Google and Samsung it seems like IoT hubs will be the next big technological lifestyle change after the use and dependence on smartphones. Although Samsung SmartThings isn’t a router like Google OnHub, the path of progression is clear.

At the end of the day, enterprise technology is all about control and when it comes down to it, it’s very hard for the IT department to not spread themselves thin keeping track of every solution individually. These hubs will not only give the IT department a clear and interactive view of everything going on in the network, they will also offer powerful wireless connections and maintain those connections across your network.

What do you think? Will you be using a hub sometime in the near future?