What smart home devices are Australians using?
Australians are no different from global smart home consumers. The main segments include comfort and lighting, control and connectivity, security, smart appliances, energy management, and home entertainment. Common smart home device brands owned by Australians include Philips, Nest, Brilliant, and Ecobee. The product ranges consist of devices to control lighting, doorbells, locks, cameras, and thermostats among many other functions. In a survey conducted in 2020, around a fifth of respondents owned smart devices for comfort and lighting, building safety and security, or smart speakers with an integrated virtual assistant.The cloud and data security
In Australia, the internet access and public cloud market have been expanding significantly over the past decade through improvements in infrastructure and accessibility. The market growth in all public cloud segments (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS) was expected to increase into the future, with the SaaS segment forecast to be valued at over eight billion U.S. dollars by 2023.With the expanding uses and storage of personal data, online privacy and data protection issues have been brought to the forefront. The majority of Australians were concerned about how companies they interact with online use their data. In 2020, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) and the Digital Transformation Agency released new cloud security guidelines to support the secure adoption of cloud services across government and industry.
A smarter outlook
The global smart home market is set to continue growing, with Australia following this trend. Smart home technology is developing at a rapid pace and looks likely to become more integrated as standard housing features for new homes built in the future. Tech companies including Apple, Amazon, and Google will likely be key market players in terms of full home automation.Along with making lives more convenient, the potential energy-saving benefits are also appealing to environmentally-conscience consumers. From more control over the energy sources used and automated efficient energy practices to smart windows that can transfer real-time weather data to a centralized home management system, these are just a few of the applications that may be normalized in homes of the future.
