Internet of Things to Revolutionize the IT Department: IDC

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IT managers are in for big changes during the next few years as billions of connected devices light up the Internet of Things (IoT), according to IDC.

The Framingham, Mass.-based technology research firm published its IoT predictions for 2015 and they point to massive disruption in data center market. Ninety percent of data center and enterprise systems management environments are expected to switch to new business models to handle IoT and BYOD devices by 2017. Forty percent of IoT data will be processed and stored at, or close to, the network edge by 2018.

IoT at the edge: By 2018, 40 percent of IoT-created data will be stored, processed, analyzed, and acted upon close to, or at the edge, of the network.

IDC also forecast that IoT will put the squeeze on IT networks. Fifty percent of networks will go from having plenty of capacity to being network constrained within three short years as they struggle to support IoT devices. Nearly 10 percent of networks will be overwhelmed, predicts IDC.

Cloud computing will help shoulder some of that burden. “Within the next five years, more than 90 percent of all IoT data will be hosted on service provider platforms,” said IDC in a statement, due to the cloud’s ability to streamline IoT “Data Blending.”

As always, where there’s data, there’s the possibility of leaks.

IDC expects IoT-based security breaches to affect a whopping 90 percent of IT networks within two years. Chief information security officers will therefore “be forced to adopt new IoT policies,” stated the firm.

IT professionals will have to grapple with some major shifts in how they manage their data, according to IDC senior vice president Vernon Turner. “The Internet of Things will give IT managers a lot to think about,” he said in a statement. “Enterprises will have to address every IT discipline to effectively balance the deluge of data from devices that are connected to the corporate network.”

And it’s not only IT departments that will have to adapt to IoT, said Turner. “In addition, IoT will drive tough organizational structure changes in companies to allow innovation to be transparent to everyone, while creating new competitive business models and products,” he continued.

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

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