However, big challenges remain before the Internet of Things becomes a feature of our everyday lives. There are social implications and questions to be answered regarding our understanding of, and exposure caused by, a factorial increase in data types trafficked to and from our homes and personal lives. Recent revelations about access to, storage and use of our human-human communications data have caused widespread consternation - but consider the implications of having all of your interactions, with all types of connected devices in your home, monitored and recorded in the interest of machine learning.

Given that many people find it hard to correctly configure and secure single devices like PCs and home networks, how will they fare when presented with the “smart home” - effectively a complex distributed system containing many tens or hundreds of networked devices, including critical domestic systems like electricity and water utilization, water heater settings, heating and cooling, refrigeration, washing machines and lighting? How will we collate, store and manage the rich, and often privacy infringing, data streams from all these tracked and connected things? This point to a need to enable meaningful Human-Data Interactions with these devices and the datasets they produce.

Organizations around the world are trying to find solutions to such problems by making devices useful and data meaningful. Just because we have data, doesn’t mean we know what to do with it. Sometimes, we don’t even know what we want to know. And interestingly, just because we can purchase and implement a device (or collection of devices), doesn’t mean it really has a valuable use. Though it may very well be interesting.

To use the Internet of Things solutions usefully in our professional and personal lives, there needs to exist a thoughtful, purposeful plan deeper than the “coolness” factor that sometimes influences our purchases. If you and your company do not currently have the expertise and don’t want to take the time to build it right now, you need a business partner who will help you get to where you want to go.

Trility Consulting is the partner you’re looking to find. Located in Urbandale, Iowa, Trility Consulting is a business and technology consulting firm with a wide range of products and services in the secure internet of things industry. With expertise in security-by-design cloud platforms, custom development and nearly every IoT device in the US and EU markets, the Trility team knows what it takes to aggregate disparate devices from different points of origination into consolidated platforms that securely gather, organize and present data in a manner that enables timely business decisions for you, your partners and customers.

Trility Consulting helps their clients make the leap from having a vision with no plan to a generally available consumer implementation with the help of a four-step experience:

• DISCOVERY: What problem are you trying to solve? Let’s identify and refine it.
• DEFINITION: What options do you have for solving this problem? Let’s define it.
• IMPLEMENTATION: Let’s implement the planned solution together.
• EVOLUTION: Hosted, managed services in public and private cloud combinations.

The Trility Consulting team has deep experience across many industries in secure cloud adoption, custom development, internet of things, information security, performance engineering, devops, and data management. Interestingly, the Founder and CEO, Matthew D Edwards, suggested to us that what differentiates the Trility teams from many other companies is their people-first, business and security-driven focus. Matthew communicated that the Trility team members seek to focus on business-driven strategic objectives first in order to avoid technology science projects. “We sometimes run into great folks that want to solve very interesting technical problems, which, upon collaborative review, may not actually be tied to the larger strategic objectives of the business,” said Matthew. “When we run into this situation, we simply work to understand what motivates the requests, how they are or are not related to larger business objectives, and refine the problem statement and solution direction into something that addresses the needs of the stakeholders and business objectives at the same time, in a security-first manner.”