The second day of the third edition of India Electronics Week (IEW) offered sessions on some of the hottest topics in the industry today. The day started off with a panel discussion on a major subject - "The security threats in the IoT paradigm – hype or a scary reality?"

Narang N. Kishor, founder, Narnix Technolabs Pvt Ltd took the stage as the moderator. The panel included imminent industry personalities including Deepu Chandran, technical manager, LDRAa Technology Pvt Ltd; Benoy C.S., director, digital transformation (ICT) practice, Frost & Sullivan; Sunil David, regional director (IoT) for AT&T India; Tulika Pandey, director, computer emergency response team – India (CERT-IN), Ministry Of Electronics & Information Technology; Sivakumar Natarajan, global practice head of the digital, manufacturing and technology strategic business unit, Wipro; and Venkatesh Kumaran, senior director, ARM.

IoT deployments are quite vulnerable to security threats, if they are not thought out carefully. The panellists answered major queries that IoT design engineers had – such as how much security is optimum for their products? The panel discussion provided a 360-degree view of security implications in various aspects of the IoT paradigm.

The panel discussion was followed by a fruitful session on IoT practices. Sapna Mongia, head - smart grids and metering, South Asia, power and discretes, STMicroelectronics, spoke on the topic, 'Adopt the best IoT practices from around the world for smart cities.'

Once more relevant to IoT security, the KTPO (Karnataka Trade Promotion Organisation) venue hosted another beneficial session called 'Secure and Cost-Effective Connectivity Through eSIM As An Iot Enabler.' The focus of the session was on explaining the advantages and benefits of eSIM cards. The key take-away for attendees, especially IoT business decision makers, was an understanding of how eSIMs could help them, learning about the complete architecture of eSIMs, discovering the roles of each entity involved and how an eSIM is an IoT enabler to help future growth. Speakers also shared market research predictions of the role eSIM cards would play in the IoT.

Any kind of progress in technology and business will need to be legally affirmed. The IoT world today, which can collect and connect to every bit of information surrounding us, may require legal restrictions. To answer all the doubts in this vertical, another panel discussion was arranged. Moderated by advocate Biju K. Nair, the topic of the session was 'Integrating the IoT ecosystem: The legal regime." Industry experts who were on the panel included Dorairaj Vembu, Sasken Technologies; Srinivas Poosarla, VP and head of Global Privacy and Data Protection; Wing Cdr Sivarama Krishna Prakash (Retd), senior corporate counsel, Cisco Systems and Amit Chatterjee, product marketing, IOTG, Intel. The panel members spoke about the various legal implications involved in diverse IoT ecosystems – smart cities, healthcare, homes or industrial. They shared essential information on how the legal criteria may cause market-specific effects and how to comply with them.

The final discussion of the day was on the topic, 'How to find areas that are low risk and high value for IoT applications.' The speaker of the session, Hrishikesh Kamat, CEO, Shalaka Connected Devices, shared his experiences of complicated IoT implementation use cases, how those presented many challenges and how simpler solutions were formulated. He provided some good advice to businesses for identifying and implementing simple and practical use cases to begin with. Decision makers who attended the session received major tips to achieve success with minimal business risks.

Apart from the discussions, IEW'18 organised some of the best workshops. The first one was 'Make your first IoT product', that taught the participants how to practically build a working IoT prototype. It explained the workflow of IoT product development and gave hands-on practice to the participants. The Intel team conducted an industrial IoT workshop. Viewers were given first-hand knowledge on making real IoT products that sell. The workshop highlighted the importance of hardware in IoT, eventually displaying the essentials of a complete electronics hardware design for a commercial IoT product. There was one more fascinating workshop on IoT applications -- 'How to obtain seamless device connectivity with IoT and Zephyr and how to design your own IoT applications.'

All the sessions and workshops were packed. The amount of information and knowledge shared throughout the day was of high quality and is bound to inspire business decision makers to implement what they had learnt.