Internet of Things (IoT) - Its Growing Impact on Data Centers

We are living in times where Internet of Things is keeping us all wirelessly wired and so connected every moment. To name a few, IoT objects like smart devices, smart homes and wearables is what everyone is looking forward to. It is revolutionizing the way people do and understand things and business by greatly influencing the industries and the world at large in the most unimaginable ways.

As Internet of Things has made an evolutionary leap from ‘Internet of Things’ to getting its new name as ‘Internet of Everything’, it has come a long way and still continues to be one of the major driver in taking technology industry forward. So as we see IoT playing a big role, the massive amount of data bits will keep gushing through datacenter creating ample opportunities for data center industry to play even a bigger role.

What Underlying Opportunities & Challenges IoT is bringing for Data Centers?

As per a Gartner report, it was stated that,

“IoT will have 25 Billion connected Units by 2020 growing approximately 5 times of what it is now in 2015 i.e. 4.9 billion connected things”.

Also, a Forrester report says that, “More than 82 percent of businesses are going to be on IoT applications by 2017”.

Above two instances show us quite clearly how IoT and Data Center are poised to form a closer and stronger connect.

And with such surge, billions of data points are continuously forming due to these IoT objects which in return requires huge storage for storing, processing and analyzing them. Also, with more and more applications being based on Internet of Things that includes the booming "smart home" market accompanying predictive analytics, would accelerate data center demands.

So the data centers would play a crucial role in interconnecting all the active components, together with chillers, UPS systems, PDUs, cooling units, etc, where a data center admin would monitor and supervise their combined functioning.

Also, the new and existing data center vendors would have to include and build IoT-aware infrastructure and capacity management platforms in their services portfolio to avoid any upsetting of uptime, bandwidth or similar parameters.

Apart from this, huge chunks of data processing will go up in direct proportion to workloads creating bottlenecks for data center providers such as capacity, security and analytics. This would call for an efficient system management platform with multiplying growth in network connections, storage capacity, server expansions giving a fillip to distributed data center management approach.

The Road Ahead

To sum it up, Internet of Things is indubitably giving rise to a host of opportunities to data centers to move, store, process and analyze the data generated by IoT translating it into useful business insights.

Though, it would take handsome amount of time to execute it all as the most datacenters currently don’t have proper systems and infrastructure ready to make the most of the data being produced.  

Henceforth, the Data center hardware and software services market will have to calculatively and strategically handle such data upsurge that witnesses a breakneck growth of IoT industry now and in time to come.