IoT projects are having a ripple effect for IT investments
The latest “Voice of the Enterprise: Internet of Things, Workloads and Key Projects” report released by 451 Research has found that the volume of data created by the Internet of Things is sending shock waves through enterprise IT departments.
The analyst’s latest survey revealed that, over the next year, 32.4 percent of organizations have plans to increase their storage capacity. A similar number, 30.2 percent, plan on installing network edge infrastructure, and 29.4 percent plan on installing additional server hardware. Cloud infrastructure increases were planned by 27.2 percent of respondents. The study found strong spending on IoT projects; 65.6 percent of respondents reported plans to increase cloud spending compared to only 2.7 percent that planned on reducing spending.
The most popular stated use case for IoT are IT projects, with surveillance and security monitoring, as well as database management, being especially popular. This is expected to shift in the next two years, with facilities automation becoming the most popular use and line-of-business-centric supply chain management jumping from the sixth most popular use to the third.
Finding workers with IoT skills was a challenge in 2016, and it remains so according these findings; with half of respondents claiming to face a skills storage. The most in-demand skills include data analytics, security, and virtualization capabilities. Company-owned resources are still popular, with 53.1 percent of companies initially storing data on their own hardware and 59.1 percent using them for analyzing IoT data. Two-thirds of these companies keep their data on their own servers, while one-third transfer it to public cloud services.
According to the researchers, cloud storage provides more flexibility and, in many cases, substantial savings when data moves from real-time and operational uses to historical use cases including trend analysis and regulatory reporting. The cloud paradigm is changing, however, with slightly less than half of respondents performing data processing tasks including analysis, aggregation, and filtering at the edge, including 22.2 percent using IoT devices and 23.3 percent using nearby IT equipment.
451 Research’s Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit takes place in Las Vegas between 18-20 September.
