Analytics Driving Enterprise IoT Deployments

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Most enterprises are already familiar with the Internet of Things (IoT), and for some, that familiarity is breeding at least a little contempt.

A majority of businesses, 70 percent in fact, have already deployed IoT solutions according to the latest survey from Strategy Analytics. Within the next three to 12 months, that figure will climb to 80 percent.

While IoT is already having a major impact on the IT market, its effects aren’t as wide reaching at individual organizations. Strategy Analytics discovered that just 25 percent of enterprises are operating full-scale IoT deployments.

After polling 350 global businesses across multiple verticals including healthcare, manufacturing and finance, the research group found that the biggest driver of IoT tech adoption is big data analytics (56 percent). As the storage industry has already discovered, big data presents its own set of challenges.

data analytics

“While Data Analytics emerged as the top reason for an IoT deployment, a significant percentage of companies struggle with how to analyze that data to benefit their business,” said Andrew Brown, executive director of Enterprise and IoT Research at Strategy Analytics, in a statement. Fifty percent of respondents said they were sitting on too much data, making analytics a tricky proposition.

Early IoT adopters are also finding it difficult to reliably capture data (28 percent) or capture data they consider useful (25 percent). More than a quarter of organizations (28 percent) are unsure of what questions to ask.

“We also found that 44 percent of respondents currently perform some data analytics but admit they could do a better job and 31 percent of organizations do not currently store IoT data at all,” Brown added.

Getting IoT technologies to play nice with existing setups is another major roadblock, according to Strategy Analytics’ director of IoT Systems Research and Consulting, Laura DiDio.

“Integration with legacy systems (41 percent) and Security are the biggest impediment to IoT deployments. Only 13 percent of respondents said that IoT will strengthen security and 56 percent said security is their top technical challenge,” DiDio stated. Nearly half of the businesses polled by the group hadn’t conducted a detailed cost analysis, undoubtedly to the dismay of their budget keepers.

The top IoT use cases are office security and surveillance, smart buildings and financial analytics. Healthcare organizations have also begun to use IoT technologies in their diagnostics and analytics operations.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.