Over-the-top headlines and estimates of the size of the IoT market create more confusion and skepticism about hype than a real understanding of how big the market really is. There needs to be a framework for understanding IoT market size.

If you think the internet's busy now, just wait until next year. Gartner estimates there will be 6.4 billion connected devices in 2016, up 30 percent from this year.

After the town of Cary, N.C., installed a water meter system that automatically radios water usage to the public works department, it eliminated 10 meter-reading positions. The water resources group operates today with a smaller staff, thanks to the Internet of Things.

Tony Scott, U.S. CIO, says there is no safer place to store data than in the cloud.

Criminals go where they can do the most damage with minimal effort. It's why, for years, hackers targeted Windows rather than Macs - it was where the users, and in turn the data, were. And now we're seeing a steady migration from one platform to the next as popularity grows. Hackers moved from Windows to Apple's OS to mobile. Now, unsurprisingly, they are targeting the cloud.

You're probably getting desensitized by now to the ever-lengthening list of data breach headlines which have saturated the news for the past couple of years. Targeted attacks, persistent threats and the like usually end up with the hackers capturing sensitive IP, customer information or trade secrets. The result? Economic damage, board level sackings and a heap of bad publicity for the breached organization. But that's usually where it ends.