DCN June 2016 | Page 28

Big Data & IoT ROLLING WITH THE CHANGES Tom Griffin of SevOne discusses some ways to get smart with IoT and Big Data. T here is no doubt that the Internet of Things (IoT) will shape our future; how we shop, how we consume power at home and at work, and the ways our cities grow and evolve. In fact, Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, with 5.5 million new things being connected every day. That’s a lot of connections and a lot of data. This growth is challenging today’s leaders to reimagine their businesses, and while many executives may be wary of the unknown, they feel the risks of adapting to IoT are much less intimidating than the possibility of being left behind. And it’s not surprising; McKinsey Global Institute predicts that the impact of IoT on the global economy might be as high as $6.2 trillion by 2025. But change is already happening. We are already seeing telcos and carriers looking to roll out commercial deployments across several verticals such as commerce and automotive and throughout this year, IoT is going to shake up virtually every market. This will force out antiquated business models and replace them with automated and dynamic methodologies. By 2018, 60 per cent of Global 1,000 companies will integrate IoT at the technology, process, security and organisation levels to fully realise the value their investments (IDC). This uptake is predicted to create zettabytes of Big Data, creating further opportunities for businesses. However, Gartner predicts that 75 per cent of IoT projects will take up to twice as long as planned, with product centred enterprises being the worst affected due to process and culture change. This, of course, rings alarm bells and enterprises will be tempted to make compromises to reduce this overrun, which could lead to significant weaknesses in performance and security. To add further complexity to the puzzle, network operations teams – responsible for managing and monitoring – also face the dilemma of