Report: Storage Infrastructure Top Priority as Firms Prep for IoT Data Boom

Growing Internet of Things (IoT) spend is set to drive a wave of new IT infrastructure over the next 12 months, according to recent analysis by 451 Research.

According to the Voice of the Enterprise: IoT – Workloads and Key Projects, 65.6 percent of respondents plan to increase their spending on IoT projects in the next 12 months, with the average spend increase totaling 17.7 percent. Only 2.7 percent of respondents are planning to decrease spending.

Specifically, organizations that are deploying IoT projects over the next 12 months plan to increase storage capacity (32.4 percent), network edge equipment (30.2 percent), server infrastructure (29.4 percent) and off-premises cloud infrastructure (27.2 percent).

Storage infrastructure is the top area affected by IoT. Most respondents said they store IoT data in company-owned data centers (53.1 percent), and once the data is analyzed, two-thirds of respondents continue to store the data at those same data centers, while one-third move data to a public cloud. Cloud storage can offer organizations more flexibility and significant cost savings over the long term of storing IoT data, 451 Research said.

Just under half of respondents said they do IoT data processing at the edge, on the IoT device (22.2 percent) or in nearby IT infrastructure (23.3 percent).

“Companies are processing IoT workloads at the edge today to improve security, process real-time operational action triggers, and reduce IoT data storage and transport requirements,” Rich Karpinski, Research Director for Voice of the Enterprise: Internet of Things said. “While some enterprises say that in the future they will do more analytics – including heavy data processing and analysis driven by big data or AI – at the network edge, for now that deeper analysis is happening in company-owned data centers or in the public cloud.”

The top IoT use cases being deployed are data center management and surveillance, and security monitoring. Over the next two years, IoT project priorities are operations-focused facilities automation and line-of-business-centric supply chain management.

With the number of IoT workloads growing, finding workers with the right skills remains a challenge for half of surveyed organizations. Skills in highest demand are data analytics, security and virtualization capabilities.

Security remains a challenge to IoT deployments as there are no clear security standards for IoT devices – though the U.S. government is trying to introduce legislation to change that. Developers are concerned that IoT devices are more vulnerable than web apps and online services to attacks, and in response, more IT decision-makers are setting aside a standalone security budget for IoT.