The point of industrial IOT is being able to manage your infrastructure, rather than just have an opaque layer of workers who keep the infrastructure going. Whether or not it actually costs less is only partly relevant, because the concept itself is catnip to the decision makers who decide to buy into this stuff.
It’s all about turning expensive arrays of inert objects into datacells on a spreadsheet or database. From one point of view, it’s another step on the path of stupidity that management has been going for decades, of trying to abstract away your annoying employees. From another point of view, it’s a game changer because instead of having to hope that your maintenance workers have done a good job, now you can know whether or not every single doodad is in proper working order, and know instantly whenever one of them goes out of order.
As for the security implications, that ship has sailed. Every router and modem, every networked vending machine and light bulb should not be running a full fledged copy of Linux just to deliver the one single thing that they need to do. But due to the fact that nobody has been interested in spending money and time making a limited purpose, locked down OS for networked appliances, that’s the world we have.
I do think there’s going to be a nasty reckoning and a bloodbath, and lots of companies are going to get sued out of existence over crap security. Then The IOT fad will recede for a while, before coming back with a new name and better security.
