Today, the most used IT environment/consumption model for IoT applications is software as a service, with 23% citing SaaS as their primary approach to supporting current IoT deployments. In two years, however, relatively straightforward SaaS and hosted IoT applications will be increasingly replaced by more substantive IoT infrastructure, including hosted private cloud as a primary IoT deployment path by 23% respondents, followed by public IaaS and PaaS (20%).
Choosing the most appropriate venue (edge vs. near-edge vs. core/cloud) in which to deploy IoT storage, compute and analytics remains an important decision.Sixty-five percent of respondents cite security as the top factor determining the placement of IoT workloads, followed by cost (57%), availability of network connections (50%) and infrastructure resiliency (43%). Meanwhile, 67% of respondents either somewhat or strongly agree that their organization made mistakes in choosing where to deploy IoT applications, in a way that negatively impacted IoT success. This highlights the critical nature of such decisions.
IoT initiatives are made possible by a range of enabling technologies, many of which are relatively new to enterprises, but are already viewed as having a significant impact on IoT projects.The ones rated as having a ‘high impact’ on IoT are led by AI (41%), blockchain (36%) and video analytics (35%). Rounding out the technology rankings are virtual reality (31%), augmented reality (29%), autonomous robotics (28%), no-code application development (28%) and digital twin (22%).
Vendor Decisions
Respondents to our survey of OT professionals highlighted their role in choosing technology vendors in support of their industrial IoT projects. Forty-one percent strongly agree and 48% somewhat agree the choices their organization makes about IoT technology and vendor decisions ‘have a major impact on the success or failure’ of their IoT initiatives.
IT and OT both contribute to or influence IoT technology and vendor choices, although IoT is more likely to have primary responsibility for those choices. Seventy-two percent of respondents say IT contributed to IoT technology and vendor decision-making, followed by OT (60%), line of business (34%), third-party vendor partners (18%) and digital business units (17%). When it comes to primary responsibility, however, IT is much more likely to be in charge, with 50% of respondents giving IT that primary role, followed by OT (23%). Meanwhile, 13% of respondents say they don’t designate any group with lead responsibility, instead sharing it across multiple contributors.