While traditional IT infrastructure, like servers and switches, are firmly in the “back room,” operations technologies (OT) like IoT pave the way to a tighter collaboration with the business. In most cases, IoT devices, such as connected cars or smart meters, are considered business assets, and the operational data they produce is vital to business operations. Preemptive organisations see this. Seventy-four percent gather operational data from IoT, compared to 59 percent of reactive organisations.
The particular nature of IoT deployments clearly exposes the need for new approaches to infrastructure management: ► IoT devices may be deployed in the millions—automation is the only way to manage them effectively. ► In many IoT use cases, operational problems may have serious, even life- threatening consequences—there’s far greater demand for real-time monitoring. ► And in some cases there’s no guarantee of a constant connection between HQ and remote IoT devices—this is driving investment in edge and fog analytics (only 54 percent of respondents are using edge analytics at all today). CIOs should view IoT as the bridge to the business, and use these operational realities to drive their businesses to invest in transforming operations.