New Study Says IoT Needs Datacenter Advancement, or Else

We’re about to have a problem, according to a study released by IDC on April 27. The study, Impact of Internet of Things on Datacenter Demand and Operations, analyzes the growing impact of the IoT on datacenter demand and operations at a worldwide level, and it determined that investments in the datacenter will be critical for IoT services to reach their full potential over the next decade. In fact, installed service provider datacenter capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750 percent between 2014 and 2019. And the industry needs to be ready.

“IoT will emerge as the leading driver of new compute/storage deployment at the edge, countering the branch/remote office consolidation trend of the past decade,” said Richard Villars, VP, Datacenter and Cloud, IDC. “IoT will also become the top driver of IT expansion in larger datacenters, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure and data platform architectures.”

The larger datacenters will quickly need greater capacity, which will encourage and accelerate the transition to edge computing and cloud infrastructure. Much of the new datacenter capacity will likely end up in service provider datacenters, the study predicts. The report also says that the IoT will be a leading driver of new deployments at the edge, and will lead to service providers adopting Smart IT and IoT services to better monitor and manage datacenter assets.

It also predicted that IoT services are going to put every greater stress onto enterprise and service provider networks, and that paired with the growing importance of analytics in IoT services, will ensure that data centers are a major component of most IoT service offerings by 2019.

“Equal, or even greater, investments in the IoT platform services residing in the datacenter will be instrumental in delivering the IoT promise of anytime, anywhere, anyhow connectivity and context,” said Villars. “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 datacenter itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices.”

So get building.