Security and Analytics to Dominate IoT Buzz in 2016

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IoT is going mainstream this year, and in the rush to roll out IoT projects, IT leaders will be focused on security and delivering big data analytics services this year, suggests new research from Strategy Analytics, a Newton, Mass.-based consulting and analyst firm.

Data security is always a concern for enterprises. And the sheer number and variety of IoT endpoints poses new challenges that most IT security specialists may not be equipped to tackle.

In a survey of 600 organizations, Strategy Analytics found that 70 percent of IT departments devote less than a fifth (20 percent) of their time securing their networks and data. Only 6 percent said they had the ability to stop attackers in their tracks.

More than half of (56 percent) respondents said they had, or may have, experienced a security breach in the past 12 months. The analyst group’s findings “are a huge wake-up call,” said Laura DiDio, director of IoT Systems Research and Consulting for Strategy Analytics, in a statement.

The risk posed by IoT deployments pales in comparison to traditional IT environments, she added. “IoT environments exponentially increase the size of the attack vector since companies have so many more devices, end points and applications to secure.”

Many enterprises are already starting off on the wrong foot. “The survey results also revealed that 44 percent of corporations that got hacked were unable to determine, the source or the type of security attack or the duration of the breach, which is alarming,” said DiDio.

Making business sense from the glut of data produced by IoT systems will also emerge as a major IoT trend in 2016.

“Big Data Analytics is the differentiator in IoT,” stated the firm in a separate media advisory. “Strategy Analytics projects that Analytics software revenues will reach $40.4 billion worldwide in 2015 and double to $81.1 billion by 2022, exclusive of service revenues.”

And the industry can bank on billions of dollars changing hands, as many more IoT-related acquisitions are announced this year.

“Merger and acquisition activity will continue to accelerate unabated in 2016. Recent acquisitions of Altair by Sony and Jasper Technologies by Cisco have already topped $1.6 billion and demonstrate that IoT is now table stakes,” said Strategy Analytics. Eyeing the growing market for IoT hardware, Intel capped off 2015 by announcing it had finalized its $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera, a provider of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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