Even though they may not be familiar with the term “Internet of Things” (IoT), 65 percent of organizations are collecting data from equipment, devices, or other connected endpoints. And they’re using that data for business purposes, according to an IoT study conducted by 451 Research.
The vast majority of IoT data derives from data centers. More than half of IoT data (51 percent) is coming through data center IT equipment, followed by camera/surveillance equipment (34 percent), data center facilities equipment (33 percent), and smartphones (29 percent).
The type of industries using these platforms are evenly split between manufacturing organizations collecting data from factory equipment and healthcare organizations from medical devices, according to the study.
The types of data being collected are broken down into three categories: machine sensing (data gathered from machines), biological sensing (data gathered from humans and animals) and environmental sensing (data gathered from the environment). The majority of the data today is gathered from machines for business use (71.5 percent), while data gathered from humans and animals (8.5 percent) and the environment (20 percent) represents a smaller, but growing portion of the overall data.
Not surprisingly, 46 percent of the study’s respondents showed concern with IoT security, and nearly a third of respondents said that lack of internal skill sets was their biggest issue. These are followed by lack of IT capacity and lack of perceived ROI/benefits.
This study does take into consideration that IoT has rapidly emerged and has taken on both old and new meanings depending on the audience. It varies from traditional uses such as IP cameras and automation to new use cases such as crop monitoring, remote patient monitoring, and other emerging uses.