The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to continue its transformative potential across industries in 2016 and beyond, with IT services expected to lead spending within the ever-growing market.
Frost & Sullivan estimates the IoT market to be valued at $US24.2 billion in 2015 and will reach $US79.3 billion in 2020 with a CAGR of 26.8 percent from 2015 to 2020, with services accounting for nearly three quarters of the market in 2020.
“The major IoT opportunities will be in the deployment and management of IoT projects,” says Andrew Milroy, Senior Vice President of ICT Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan.
“This will lead to a requirement for new skill sets which are currently scarce in the APAC region.”
Looking ahead, Milroy says there will also be a shift towards computing decentralisation as the IT industry gradually shifts towards using more IoT technology.
Examples include P2P networks becoming more widely used, allowing connected devices to communicate directly with each other rather instead of being routed through a centralised data centre.
Milroy also expects IoT to be heavily influenced by ‘Cloudification’ and this will lead to its own set of challenges.
“These include the large amounts of data involved, realignment of existing processes and security solutions,” Milroy adds.
Milroy believes that cyber security is also paramount as the security paradigm is increasingly shifting to the physical domain in 2016.
“The increasing use of mobile devices and the gradual spread of the Internet of Things will offer many more attack vectors, and increases the risks of successful attacks enormously,” Milroy adds.
“The ongoing convergence of operational technology with information technology will enable the successful attackers to have much greater impacts than before.”
For Milroy, industrial control systems are more vulnerable than ever before and security will be the number one consideration as these systems are modified or developed.
In 2016, Milroy believes it is evident that security will be prioritised and built into the architecture of any new systems before they are implemented.
Data
At present, less than five percent of the data captured by sensors today are used for optimisation analytics and Milroy believes this figure has a potential to increase significantly as more and more devices get connected to the Internet.
With the growth of data coming from IoT becoming a reality, Big Data providers are starting to sit up and take note and incorporate solutions that cater to this growth.
“As it becomes clear that IoT data will potentially dwarf social media and traditional internet data, Big Data providers have started working closely with IoT vendors to create platforms to support data management, data analytics and enable data collaboration,” Milroy adds.
“Enterprises today utilise insights collected to drive efficiency in their internal processes and we are seeing more use cases where big data is used as an extension of an enterprise’s core revenue but this will require a change in their existing business model.
