IoT systems generate continuous device events under unreliable network conditions. Data often arrives late, out of order, or duplicated, especially as devices disconnect and reconnect at scale.
Most real-time IoT architectures propagate these events incrementally. As a result, downstream systems operate on partial views of device state, with operations, analytics, and machine learning observing different versions of reality at the same time.
Teams compensate with replay jobs, buffering, and manual reconciliation. These measures increase operational cost and complexity without eliminating inconsistencies.
The issue is not data volume or velocity. Event streams alone do not produce consistent system state, making real-time IoT data fragile as scale increases.