The Internet of Things has a potential transformational effect on the data centre market, its customers, technology providers, technologies, and sales and marketing models, according to a study by Gartner.
The research and analysis firm estimates that the Internet of Things (IoT) will include 26 billion units installed by 2020, and by that time, IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion, mostly in services.
"IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analysed in real time," said 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."
IoT connects remote assets and provides a data stream between the asset and centralised management systems. Those assets can then be integrated into new and existing organisational processes to provide information on status, location, functionality and so on.
Real-time information enables more accurate understanding of status, and it enhances utilisation and productivity through optimised 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."