The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly increasing the amount of data generated, and industry experts warn that the current river of unstructured data will soon turn into a flood. Alarmingly, a recent study highlighted concerns that most proposed approaches could lead to data management overload ineffective for the coming torrent of data.
Enterprise Tech cited a recent Gartner report that examined the impact IoT will have on enterprise infrastructure. The report warned that “due to a lack of information capabilities adapted for the IoT” an estimated 25% of attempts to utilize IoT data will be abandoned before deployment ever occurs.
Gartner cautions that IoT specialists who are tasked with IoT strategies and managing data governance, “are not prepared for the information-related implications of the Internet of Things.”
“The IoT will challenge their capabilities, skills, processes and tools with complexity and scale, as well as new governance implications,” said Gartner which predicted information management must become a core competency in the future.
Capabilities to handle data management overload are key
Gartner identified a key IoT requirement in the future will be data management capabilities. Specifically, it highlights the need for an ability to manage distributed data architectures that execute governance processes while simultaneously supporting analytics.
With its expectation that 25% of IoT implementations will be abandoned in the early stages, the report recommends using an “information capabilities framework” as a template for enterprises struggling with the surge in data. This approach begins by assessing the information value through metadata analysis, and then data governance rules are applied. After this, the data can be sifted and integrated into the larger enterprise system.
A major challenge for IoT data manages will be reconsidering organizational storage capacity, and analyzing the conditions that users will access the IoT data.
The report warns that the flood of unstructured IoT information will soon overwhelm existing data storage capacity and that existing storage can only be expanded so much.
“A limited ability to cost-effectively scale existing storage approaches will create a bottleneck,” said Gartner.
A major data management rethink is needed
The report also urged IT managers to rethink the traditional centralized data collection approach, due to the highly dispersed nature of IoT data generation and consumption.
“With the highly distributed architectures required for most IoT solutions (many things, many places where data is generated, many platforms on which data is processed, and many consumption points to which data must be delivered), the historical approach to centralized collection of data is under pressure. Organizations must support a more distributed data architecture, because IoT solutions are inherently distributed.”
