IT Glossary
What is IoT?
The Internet of Things: sensors, machines, vehicles and equipment that stay connected, report their own data, and can be commanded remotely.
A refrigerated warehouse used to be checked twice a day by someone with a clipboard; now a thirty-euro sensor watches it every minute and phones the manager before the stock spoils. That shift is the Internet of Things: the layer of physical objects — temperature probes, self-reading meters, machines reporting hours and vibration, GPS-tracked vehicles, cameras, even city bins announcing they are full — that sense and transmit. For a company the value is bluntly concrete: continuous visibility where a person used to walk rounds, predictive maintenance (the machine that flags abnormal vibration before halting production), energy metered per equipment so the bill's leaks become visible, and cold chains with complete traceability. The typical architecture is simple to reason about: devices talk over networks suited to the job (WiFi, cellular, LoRaWAN for battery lives measured in years), data lands in a platform that stores it, charts it and raises alerts, and from there integration with company systems begins. Two lessons recur in real deployments: start from one measurable pain rather than 'connect everything', and treat security as day-one work — cheap devices with factory passwords are the classic Trojan horse of company networks.
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Why it matters for your business
Permanent eyes where the clipboard went
Temperatures, levels, meters, doors — monitored continuously with instant alerts instead of checked whenever someone passes by.
Failures announced before they cost
Machines reporting their own parameters allow intervention at the first symptoms — unplanned production stops become measurably rarer.
Utility bills under a magnifying glass
Consumption metered per equipment and per hour shows exactly where energy and money leak — the basis of any real optimisation.
Frequently asked questions
How big an investment does a first IoT project require?
Smaller than the field's reputation suggests: monitoring a warehouse's temperature or a handful of machines — sensors costing tens to hundreds of euros each plus a modest platform subscription — installs in days. The expensive projects are the scaled ones; the pilot that proves value is cheap.
What security risks do IoT devices bring into a company?
Real and underestimated ones: devices with unchanged factory passwords, stale firmware and direct internet exposure become entry doors into the network — IP cameras are the classic example. Minimum hygiene: changed credentials, updates, and IoT devices isolated on their own network segment away from computers holding data.
Where does sensor data end up, and who owns it?
A question to ask before purchase: vendor platforms host the data with them — check where, for how long, and how you export it — while self-hosted solutions leave it under your control. For sensitive operational data like production rates, consumption or routes, the contract's export and ownership clauses are worth as much as the technology.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247