Into the Phygital Era: How IoT is Merging the Physical & Digital Worlds

’Phygital’ is just the latest in a series of buzzwords describing the meeting of the physical (offline) and digital (online) worlds. The physical world can include anything – a building, a vehicle, or an animal, or even the way a crowd moves through a crowded event or how traffic flows at an intersection. When physical things have digital twins, the ‘thing’ is in the real world and the twin is the digital data generated.

This ‘phygital’ meeting of the physical and digital worlds reflects a general shift in human consciousness, where people want to create a digital world that can be interacted with as if it’s a physical world. Today, it is nearly impossible to imagine a world where any physical object does not have a digital component in one way or another. And online environments, such as social networks and e-commerce, which currently only exist in digital form, will merge with physical objects not just as a supplement, but as an integral part of them. This is a marked change from when the digital revolution kicked off in the 1950s – back then it was all about the transformation of analogue and mechanical activities to digital activities.

The integration of IoT sensors and devices leads to automation and the reduction of human intervention, and in the business world, they are becoming imperative.

Digitalization is data-driven, and billions of IoT devices and sensors generate the data that supports the convergence of the physical and the digital, while analytics take the data and turn it into usable insights and information, disrupting businesses and creating new markets.

All that data generated by IoT devices needs to be sent somewhere and that somewhere is usually the cloud, because when you talk about digitalization you must be in the cloud universe. Previously, we were sending data via APN (Access Point Name) and VPN (Virtual Private Network). These are both efficient but they’re also very hefty – hefty to manage, hefty to migrate, hefty to work with, and hefty to update. With the cloud it’s completely different. Many customers are already part of the cloud universe, using cloud vendors such as AWS and Azure.

For Tele2 IoT, compliance to the latest connectivity technologies is crucial. We know that our customers need an easy and secure way to directly, securely, and dynamically connect to distributed infrastructure and digital ecosystems using a single port. We also know that many of our customers are already using one of the cloud operators. This knowledge has led to us developing our first in class Cloud Interconnect solution. Cloud Interconnect is essentially ‘plug and play’, and allows customers to directly, securely, and dynamically connect to distributed infrastructure and digital ecosystems using a single port in a safe and secure way. As long as the customer is using one of the cloud operators, we can integrate IoT connectivity to it to help speed up the digitalization process, something that is increasingly crucial in the ‘phygital’ world.

If you would like to learn more about how IoT can enable your business, please get in touch.

Onur Kasaba
Sales Director
Tele2 IoT

Into the Phygital Era: How IoT is Merging the Physical & Digital Worlds

IoT is the digitalization catalyst, because in order to digitalize the physical world, you need to connect it. IoT builds a bridge between services and offerings, and seamlessly merges the physical and digital worlds.

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