By: Surinder Dhar – Director of Mobile Solutions, Business Development
IoT and Digital Transformation are two initiatives taking the world by storm and are rapidly taking us towards a more digital future. While we have been heading in this direction since the late 1990s, when they were termed M2M and Computerization respectively, we have now passed the inflation point in the growth curve and are moving towards a period of rapid growth. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), data and analytics, security, communications, and endpoint technology are the key underlying technologies responsible for this growth. The Digital Transformation encompasses digital technologies to create or modify existing business processes, culture and customer experiences to meet the changing business environment. Connected devices and the data they generate is changing the business environment rapidly, as we are seeing a huge market shift at different levels. Instead of simple sensors, we have advanced sensors that can process data. Instead of automation, we are talking about autonomous devices and from connected products, we have moved to connected supply chain. The following statistics provide a snapshot regarding the amount of data and devices currently in use and future usage rates are only expected to continue this exponential growth:
- 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced every day (that’s 2.5 followed by 18 zeros).
- By the year 2023, the IoT will comprise 50.11 billion connected devices.
It would take a lifetime to manually analyze the data produced by a single sensor (based on 9.2MB data generated per minute) on a production line.The explosion of connected devices is forcing us to think about Digital Transformation in a new way.
The voluminous and dispersed data generated by these endpoints is distributed in three locations: on-premises, the cloud, and the edge. IoT deployments are blurring the boundaries of infrastructure and data aggregation. Processing is trending towards the edge and away from the premises. Edge in this case represents endpoint or anything between endpoints and core. Per the IDC, by 2023 17% of the data will be created at the edge which is a new paradigm of the Digital Transformation. Edge is not only considered a key enabler for IoT but has potential to underpin the growth of AI, consumer gaming, machine video, AR/VR, drones & robotics and network function virtualization.
While Digital Transformation practices on-premises and the cloud are well established, the new frontier is enabling this transformation at the edge. Enterprises need the latest, sophisticated technology to manage, protect, and extract insights and, as a result, enterprise edge strategies are key for this new Digital Transformation. Given that overall edge computing standards and frameworks are still being developed, most of the edge data management practices today are established on a user-by-user basis. It is recommended for businesses to implement hybrid data management strategies that are run on top of the core-edge infrastructure and in harmony with the asset and application management framework to maximize the value of edge computing.
Please contact info@valid.com to learn how Valid can help you in your Digital Transformation and IoT initiatives.
