The Internet of Things (IoT) explosion will be a major driver of technology investments over the next decade.
Although the billions of endpoints or connected "things" will capture the headlines for IoT, investments in the data centere will be critical for IoT services to reach their full potential.
According to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC), installed service provider datacenter capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750 per cent between 2014 and 2019.
"Equal, or even greater, investments in the IoT platform services residing in the data centre will be instrumental in delivering the IoT promise of anytime, anywhere, anyhow connectivity and context," says Rick Villars, vice-president, datacentre and Cloud, IDC.
“Given the number of devices connected and the amount of data generated, businesses must focus on their IoT service platform requirements at the level of the datacentre itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices."
Without question, Villars believes IoT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger datacentres, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure.
Consequently, Villars predicts that the agility and scale required in IoT deployments will ensure that much of that datacentre capacity ends up residing in service provider datacentres.
Additional findings from IDC's research report that IoT will emerge as the leading driver of new compute/storage deployment at the edge while the growing importance of analytics in IoT services will ensure that hyperscale datacentres remain a “major component” of most IoT service offerings by 2019.
IoT services will place growing stress in most enterprise and service provider networks with service providers on the whole expected to adopt IoT technologies (Smart IT) and services to better monitor and manage their own data centre assets in the form of Smart datacentres.
