The Internet of Things (IoT) can potentially transform the data center market, its customers, technology providers, technologies, and sales and marketing models.
According to research firm Gartner, by 2020, IoT will include 26 billion units installed. By that time, IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion, mostly in services.
Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner, said “IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time. Processing large quantities of IoT data in real time will increase as a proportion of workloads of data centers, leaving providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges.”
IOT creates new value from data
The IoT connects remote assets and provides a data stream between the asset and centralized management systems. Those assets can then be integrated into new and existing organizational processes to provide information on status, location, functionality, and so on.
Real-time information enables more accurate understanding of status, and it enhances utilization and productivity through optimized usage and more accurate decision support. Business and data analytics give insights into the business requirements data feed from the IoT environment and will help predict the fluctuations of IoT-enriched data and information.
"The enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity and structure of IoT data, creates challenges, particularly in the areas of security, data, storage management, servers and the data center network, as real-time business processes are at stake," said Joe Skorupa, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Data center managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management in these areas to be able to proactively meet the business priorities associated with IoT."