Why You Absolutely Need Analytics If You are Learning IoT?

An internet statistics revealed that the amount of data we generate on a daily basis would require close to 56 billion 32GB iPads to fit in all of them. That’s how much data that is being generated globally every single day. With the numbers anticipated to explode further in the coming years, multiple sectors in the IT industry are also expected to become complementary. Though IoT is all about connected devices, what drives these devices is data, which is transmitted every single second from the device to the cloud and back. These massive chunks of data that you and the devices generated are required to understand tons of crucial information on location, user behaviour, user preferences, device status, optimization of performances and more.

At the backend of any connected device, data is the sole crucial element that entirely serves the purpose of IoT. Imagine if you own a smartwatch that is designed to monitor your heart rate when you run. But when you do, the device is incapable of sensing and transmitting data, has the purpose of the connected device been solved?

In another instance, consider an autonomous car. The driverless car equipped with sensors and state-of-the-art gadgets relies more on the data these devices rather than the devices themselves. The IR sensors detect any incoming objects, speed breakers, passing vehicles, pedestrians, weather conditions, traffic lights, elevated roads, rear views, and more. And this happens every second of the drive. All these huge chunks of data that get generated are processed at the backend to allow the car to make better driving decisions and in this case, analytics becomes inevitable.

Further, with Machine Learning algorithms, the car begins to learn new things about roads, pedestrian behaviour, objects, road bumps and more to ensure a better and safer travel the next time you are on the same route.

To help you understand better, here is an interesting video.

The point here is that analytics and IoT are very closely related as the devices are connected together for the very purpose of generating data and uncovering insights from them. An e-commerce vendor giving you suggestions on what you should buy next is the result of the connected infrastructure that has detected a requirement of the suggestion when analyzing your behaviour. For instance, if you had bought baby diapers, have you noticed that you would receive suggestions again within a week or two depending on your purchase? That is data in tandem with IoT in action again.

If this is the scenario in the market, IoT and analytics have managed to influence the job market as well. Today, average IT professionals are being done away with in the pretext of redundant skill sets. Companies are increasingly reinvesting on analytics and automation to bring in optimized performances and efficiency and those who failed to adapt to the trend have ended up losing their jobs. Besides, if you have skills in data science and IoT, consider yourself an Uber ride at surge pricing. You have almost 5X chance of landing a job at the top tier companies not just in India but abroad as well. As everything becomes data-centric, companies need people like you who specialized skills. If you are looking at a rewarding career this year, learn both and cut your way through the competition.