Internet of Things Heralds New IT Services Opportunities in 2016

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to continue its transformative potential across industries in the foreseeable future.  This momentum is expected to continue in 2016, with services expected to lead spending in the IoT space.  Frost & Sullivan estimates the IoT market to be valued at US$24.2 billion in 2015 and will reach US$79.3 billion in 2020 with a CAGR of 26.8% from 2015 to 2020, with services accounting for nearly three quarters of the market in 2020.

"The major IoT opportunities will be in the deployment and management of IoT projects. This will lead to a requirement for new skill sets which are currently scarce in the APAC region," noted Mr. Andrew Milroy, Senior Vice President, ICT Practice, Asia Pacific.

There will also be a shift towards computing decentralization as the IT industry gradually shifts towards using more IoT technology. Examples include P2P networks becoming more widely used, allowing connected devices to communicate directly with each other rather instead of being routed through a centralized data centre.

Milroy also expects IoT to be heavily influenced by 'Cloudification' and this will lead to its own set of challenges. These include the large amounts of data involved, realignment of existing processes and security solutions.

Cyber security is also paramount as the security paradigm is increasingly shifting to the physical domain in 2016. The increasing use of mobile devices and the gradual spread of the Internet of Things will offer many more attack vectors, and increases the risks of successful attacks enormously. The ongoing convergence of operational technology with information technology will enable the successful attackers to have much greater impacts than before. Industrial control systems are more vulnerable than ever before and security will be the number one consideration as these systems are modified or developed. In 2016, it is evident that security will be prioritized and built into the architecture of any new systems before they are implemented.

Less than 5% of the data captured by sensors today are used for optimization analytics and this figure has a potential to increase significantly as more and more devices get connected to the Internet. With the growth of data coming from IoT becoming a reality, Big Data providers are starting to sit up and take note and incorporate solutions that cater to this growth. As it becomes clear that IoT data will potentially dwarf social media and traditional internet data, Big Data providers have started working closely with IoT vendors to create platforms to support data management, data analytics and enable data collaboration. Enterprises today utilize insights collected to drive efficiency in their internal processes and we are seeing more use cases where big data is used as an extension of an enterprise's core revenue but this will require a change in their existing business model. This will take time for revenue to grow because their customers will also need to change their procurement processes to cater to this.

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