Datacenter Investments Critical to IoT Expansion, IDC Says 

The Internet of Things (IoT) explosion will be a major driver of technology investments over the next decade. Although the billions of endpoints or connected "things" will capture the headlines for IoT, investments in the datacenter will be critical for IoT services to reach their full potential. According to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC), installed service provider datacenter capacity consumed by IoT workloads will increase nearly 750% between 2014 and 2019.

"Equal, or even greater, investments in the IoT platform services residing in the datacenter will be instrumental in delivering the IoT promise of anytime, anywhere, anyhow connectivity and context," said Rick Villars, Vice President, Datacenter and Cloud. "Given the number of devices connected and the amount of data generated, businesses must focus on their IoT service platform requirements at the level of the datacenter itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices."

Without question, IoT will become the top driver of IT expansion in larger datacenters, speeding the transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure. The agility and scale required in IoT deployments will ensure that much of that datacenter capacity ends up residing in service provider datacenters.

Additional findings from IDC's research include the following:

• IoT will emerge as the leading driver of new compute/storage deployment at the edge
• The growing importance of analytics in IoT services will ensure that hyperscale datacenters are a major component of most IoT service offerings by 2019
• IoT services will place growing stress in most enterprise and service provider networks
• Service providers will adopt IoT technologies (Smart IT) and services to better monitor and manage their own datacenter assets (Smart Datacenters)

This IDC Special Study, Impact of Internet of Things on Datacenter Demand and Operations (IDC #255397), analyzes the growing impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on datacenter demand and operations at a worldwide level. The study discusses the key use profiles that are shaping deployments of IT assets from edge to cloud in support of IoT offerings. It translates the worldwide IoT market outlook published in Worldwide and Regional Internet of Things 2014–2020 Forecast Update by Technology Split (IDC #252330) into a forecast of new and installed datacenter capacity. It segments datacenter capacity in terms of space, servers and storage deployed by type of datacenter (server closet to mega datacenter) and datacenter owner (internal organization or service provider). This study also assesses the use of IoT type technologies (smart IT sensors) within datacenters themselves to improve datacenter operating efficiency (Smart Datacenters). It provides a worldwide forecast for IoT-enabled datacenters that are the foundation for delivering smart datacenter solutions to end customers and service providers.