The Internet of Things is one of the most exciting areas in technology right now, and one that continues to develop and expand at an incredible rate. I’ve written before about my hopes for IoT and the question of how soon we’re going to see it transform modern living – I think it’s definitely going to happen, however long it takes to reach a wide uptake. But once it does, we’re going to see an immediate, huge impact on one of the other areas I work in – data centre.
Leading tech research company Gartner have estimated that by 2020 there will be 26 billion active units in the Internet of Things, all of them will be constantly generating and sharing data, and very few will have substantial onboard storage. So where are we going to put all that data? Not only are we looking at a huge volume of data (all those small data sensor messages being sent for interpretation and processing add up fast), a lot of it will relate to individuals personal device usage and so need to be kept securely to avoid any privacy issues. We also need to factor in that all of this data will need to be easily (and affordably) harvested, analysed and fed back to those IoT devices.
So for the world of data center, this will be a huge rise in demand for their services. I’m confident though that it will also be an area that inspires data center as a whole to evolve, adapt and push forward. It’s sure to be a boon for huge colocation centers – facilities that are at least 50000 square feet (over 80,000 servers) and allow customers to rent equipment, space and bandwidth as their needs dictate. It may be a deciding factor in finally persuading some holdouts to convert to a cloud-based storage approach. It’ll also be interesting to see if any dedicated IoT datacenter providers will emerge and prosper in the coming years or if the IoT world will come to rely on the same big name Service Providers, like other large enterprises tackling the big data sprawl?
If you work in the Data Center or IoT spaces and are interested in career advancement, or discussing the future of your sector, e-mail me: mike@kindglobaltech.com.
Mike Bennett