IoT & CLOUD COMMUNICATION
WHAT’S IN STORE FOR THE FUTURE OF INFRASTRUCTURE? The last few months have seen a dramatic change in how we live, work and move around our cities due to the pandemic. Some states like Victoria are still facing strict lockdowns, while other states have started to open things back up. While there is a lot of uncertainty, now is the time to start exploring what the industry will look like post-COVID.
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o help provide some answers to this big issue, Infrastructure magazine gathered the infrastructure industry’s leading experts to explore their predictions at the first Future of Infrastructure Virtual Conference in July. Speakers delved deep into issues including the rise of cloud-based infrastructure; using the economic rebuild to make assets more sustainable; how mobility and transport usage will change, and what the sector can do to meet this new demand; as well as what nation rebuilding will look like post-COVID and the new waves of innovation for the sector. Frank Zeichner, CEO, Internet of Things Alliance Australia (IoTAA), spoke about the Internet of Things (IoT), digital infrastructure and what’s needed for Australian IoT infrastructure. IoT by International Standards Organisation/IEC definition is “an infrastructure of interconnected objects, people, systems and information resources together with intelligent services to
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November 2020 // Issue 17
allow them to process information of the physical and virtual world and react”. Frank said he and IoTAA work from the premise that data will be the tool that we will use to make better decisions, and that while the internet had a dramatic effect on the way businesses ran when it first emerged, the Internet of Things will have an even bigger impact. “We're collecting some of the information that allows us to start making faster decisions about how we might optimise services, how we might better use our assets, how we might provide warnings for safety, for example. So the Internet of Things is a systemic thing, and it’s about collecting, transforming and sharing data,” he said. “It's ultimately about gaining insights and information from data, to improve business processes in operations and customer engagement.” When looking at how different Australian sectors ranked in a McKinsey Australia Industry Digitisation Index, the level of
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