Internet of Things to transform datacentre opportunity

Related product and service suppliers will benefit to tune of $300bn by 2020

The need to process even larger volumes of data in real time means the Internet of Things will mean additional security, capacity and analytics challenges for datacentre providers.

Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner, said his research indicates that 26 billion different "things" will be online by 2020 as more sensors, gadgets and other devices are hooked up to the internet.

"Processing large quantities of Internet of Things (IoT) data in real time will increase as a proportion of workloads of datacentres, leaving providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges," he said.

The related market for products and services stemming from this transformation of the datacentre is expected to exceed $300bn (£181bn) by 2020, Biscotti added, mainly as incremental revenue from services.

"IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analysed in real time," he said.

The IoT will connect remote assets, creating a data stream between the asset and centralised management systems. Those assets can then be integrated into new and existing organisational processes to provide information on status, location, functionality, and so on, Biscotti noted.

Real-time information enables more accurate understanding of status, and it enhances utilisation and productivity through optimised usage and more accurate decision support. And that is where business and data analytics come in, he added.

Datacentre managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management, according to Gartner, and new architecture will present operations staff with significant challenges, as they will need to manage the entire environment as a homogeneous entity yet be able to monitor and control individual locations.

Backup alone will present "potentially insoluble" governance issues relating to bandwidth, and probably be unaffordable. Automated, selective backup will become necessary – placing even more demands on data processing due to the need to sift and sort the right data.

The conclusions are from a Gartner report called The Impact of the Internet of Things on Datacentres.