The market for the Internet of Things is set to hit $300 billion, with 26 billion connected devices by the year 2020, according to tech research and advisory firm Gartner.
Analysts from Gartner released their predictions this week for how the Internet of Things will shape up in the coming years with the growing proliferation of smart mobile devices and wearable tech. The IoT of things refers to the spread of online connectivity to virtually every aspect of our lives. We’re seeing it now with cars as well as health and fitness equipment, and it’s spreading out more and more to manufacturing and management. With this growing need, comes a higher demand for more devices.
“IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time,” explained Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner. “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.”
Joe Skorupa, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, added, “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. “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."
The prospect of these ever-flowing streams of data has brought up a number of privacy concerns too as it is possible that every piece of information relating to your day-to-day life is now online and moving to and from data centers.
“As is already the case with smart metering equipment and increasingly digitized automobiles, there will be a vast amount of data providing information on users' personal use of devices that, if not secured, can give rise to breaches of privacy,” said Gartner in its official statement. “This is particularly challenging as the information generated by IoT is a key to bringing better services and the management of such devices.”
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
