The real estate industry is one of the biggest markets there is and, at the same time, one of the most important. The products and services offered are vital for the buyers because the industry provides homes for families, offices, or buildings for businesses that will make use, in most cases, for an extended period of their private and business life. A fact that postulates the security of digital services and products as paramount.
Unfortunately, current solutions are not complying with the security and privacy requirements that a homeowner demands. As for business owners, the real-time data to information required to make decisions is also not assured with present solutions that are the drivers of the Internet of Things devices deployment. This results in a global digital deceleration hindering the great benefits IoT can provide to real estate, families, and businesses.
The primary factor current solutions have, making digitalization less secure, private and not constantly achieving real-time data to information, is their centralized nature. Because of this centralization throughout the tech solutions, a groundbreaking solution that comes with decentralization is a necessity. The IoT devices deployment is in its initial stages, giving current solutions a temporal safe line. But if we want to achieve IoT digitalization globally, this secure line will probably break.
If this happens, the benefits of digitalization for real estate can come to a halt, advantages that, to present a few, activate:
· Predictive maintenance.
· Faster decision-making.
· Increasing energy efficiency.
· Saving time and energy.
· Increased resale value.
Before we continue describing the benefits of digitalization in real estate and how a decentralized architecture can help accelerate its global implementation. We will offer an overview of digitalization development and its definitions, as we understand that it is a relatively new concept that not all people know.
We have already mentioned IoT as being an integral part of digitalization through all industry verticals and benefit societies. Now we take a deep dive into this concept and the logical orchestration of IoT through the Internet of Everything.
The IoT is the interconnection of wireless and wired devices, such as smartphones, computers, sensors, wearable devices, etc. All these are creating data that is then injected into the internet to analyze, process, and store to gain information that offers valuable insights.
Digital technological innovation is applied to industry verticals with many advantages, like the ones we listed above. Adding to the market, a streamline of smart products like:
· Homes.
· Cities.
· Sensors.
· Grids.
With the growing usage of digital devices for industries and people, the Internet of Everything is a groundbreaking software technology that can orchestrate digitalization globally. This architecture is based on four fundamental pillars that are integrated to offer an intelligent stream of data to information, comprised by:
· People — Currently, the connection is primarily based on wearables (healthcare sensors, fitness trackers), smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc. Soon, where IoE will be fundamental, data produced by people will come from their homes, vehicles, leisure resorts, waste, and much more. An injection of data that IoE, with the power of, e.g., AI algorithms, will be able to analyze and thus, “understand” human issues.
· Data — The enormous amounts of data created by IoT devices and people are raw data, which has no value. It is like raw petroleum; it needs to be refined to be of use. IoE makes it possible to summarize, classify, analyze, and turn it into priceless information that can be used to favor social engineering, industrial innovation, sustainable procedures, and, in essence, empower intelligent solutions.
· Processes — Innovative processing approaches like artificial intelligence, machine learning, social networks, and other technologies actuate with IoE. Ensuring that the correct information reaches the right person or machine at the right time. In essence, the goal of IoE processing is to guarantee the best possible usage of Big Data.
· Things — IoE gives IoT another access point to output and input data on their real-time status and send it to the needed destination across the network. An autonomous approach that wasn't possible before the orchestration of the Internet of Everything wasn’t possible, resulting in a more dynamic data flow.
Implementing this type of digitalization helps accelerate IoT deployment through a decentralized IoE that works onsite. The following benefits that we will present have a highway on which to drive global digitalization safely, privately, sustainably, and efficiently.
After the overview of what is the Internet of Things and the Internet of Everything, we present some interesting IoT applications that can produce advantages for early adopters in the real estate industry.
IoT applications can offer predictive analytics, enabling homeowners to identify and address system failures before they happen. A solution that is actioned via sensors and real-time energy monitoring keeps track of any irregularities on equipment and alerts when it’s time for maintenance.
IoT applications offer in-depth insight to interested parties to obtain an overall picture of the household or office. Using this information before acquiring the property helps to make faster decisions because they can do a home valuation beforehand.
In the same way, IoT devices can monitor to predict system failures and alert for maintenance; the sensors can be applied to control energy waste. This technology can be installed to suit homeowners’ schedules and optimize the water heater running times, a solution that can significantly reduce cost.
These are just a few of the present applications that can be installed in households and office buildings, creating a better and more trustworthy environment for real estate professionals. Assuring lenders, investors, and future homeowners that the technology implemented into their properties benefits their pocket and lifestyle is great.
· Smart appliances — Having a well-designed decentralized architecture to orchestrate IoT devices deployment via IoE can reduce energy bills by 15%.
As indicated earlier, current centralized solutions are not the answer for a future global IoT devices deployment. The nature of the centralized solutions’ process is sustained by moving data produced onsite, in this case, a household or office appliance, to a server center. The data is stored, analyzed, and processed in these centers to then send it back to the original location.
This procedure opens particular vulnerabilities that are beginning to appear in everyday cases and acts on all industry verticals. A clear threat that comes with centralized solutions is the possibility of cyber-criminals and cyber-terrorists targeting weak spots inside a centralized network. The consequences of this can be catastrophic, as the whole network breaks down and leaves users with no services, and in most cases, the solution is to pay the cybercriminals or cyberterrorists what they ask. A situation that is a common occurrence, with many companies being victims of cyberattacks and having to spend thousands or even millions of dollars to release their network from ransomware, DDoS attack, malware, or phishing.
To put in perspective the huge threat and costly outcomes of cyber-criminals and cyber-terrorists, we offer some examples:
· Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) — DDoS attacks are designed to saturate the organization’s online operations with many requests that cripple interruption in one or more of its services. In early-2020, the multinational cloud services provider of Amazon, AWS, received the most significant DDoS attack ever > AWS said it mitigated a 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack, the largest ever.
· Ransomware — This is a type of malware from cryptovirology threatening to publish personal data or perpetually block access to it unless a ransom is paid. In early-2021, the Colonial Pipeline, an American oil pipeline system carrying gasoline and jet fuel mainly to the Southeastern United States, suffered a cyberattack > Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack.
· Malware — Malware is software that has been created to damage or utilize a part of software or hardware. Nebraska Medicine lost over 219K users’ data to a malware attack in late-2020 > Nebraska Medicine Notifies 219,000 Patients About September 2020 Malware Attack.
· Phishing grounds its potential by sending a fraudulent message intended to trick the receiver into exposing sensitive information or deploying malicious software into the victim's infrastructure. A 2019 FBI report indicates a $26 billion loss since the first phishing attack > Business Email Compromise The $26 Billion Scam.
Another vulnerability is the latency problem that centralized solutions are prone to; in simple terms, latency is the time between user action and the response from the website or application to this action. This is a growing problem for the global IoT devices deployment, which in practical usage doesn’t assure real-time data on a 24/7 basis.
One of the major reasons for latency is the distance between the client and the center that provides the service. Therefore, real estate properties that are not close enough to server centers can be affected by latency. If we add to this the bandwidth capacity and throughput of the server center, the response can be even slower.
· Bandwidth - The maximum amount of data that can pass through the network at any given time.
· Throughput - The average amount of data passing through over a given time.
We hope the above information was clear enough to understand the growing potential of insecurities and malfunctions current solutions have for the IoT devices deployment on a global scale. A decentralized digital architecture can solve this problem.
We at IoE Corp have seen these problems and have based our technological solutions on a decentralized architecture; Eden System. A decentralized model based on scalable device clustering, where it is easy to add new devices as nodes. Making it possible for any device to contribute computing resources over an intelligent mesh network so that computing can happen where it is needed and close to where it will be used.
As for the network's security, we developed quantum-safe tunnels using polymorphic encryption keys and used a blockchain with consensus to verify the data moved between the nodes over the tunnels, thus creating trusted data walled gardens.
The orchestration of computing and storage is done via service manifests that describe services rules, policies, and logic. An autonomous knowledge-based AI manages the underlying orchestration mechanics using network consensus over the blockchain as a deciding mechanism. The orchestration dynamically updates the cluster topography to fit the current workload.
Eden System is not a traditional, all-inclusive PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) system. Instead, IoE Eden is a secure walled garden solution that operates at the service level rather than the hardware level. It provides features common to PaaS and IaaS offerings, such as deployment, scaling, and load balancing.
However, Eden System is not monolithic, and these default solutions are optional and pluggable. IoE Eden provides the building blocks for building and deploying service but preserves user choice and flexibility where it is crucial. We are ready to accelerate IoT devices deployment through all industry verticals like real estate with all these innovations.
Get in touch with us, and we’ll be happy to introduce you to our technology in more detail and how we can tailor it to your current needs and offer the possibility of scaling through Eden System in an efficient, sustainable, safe, and cost-effective way.
