(248) 735-0648

Rapid growth of IoT

Gartner predicts that 6.4 billion “things” will be connected to the Internet in 2016 and this number will grow to 21 billion by 2020. IDC’s Digital Universe study predicts that the world’s data will be almost 44 zettabytes by 2020, and the Internet of Things ( IoT ) will account for approximately 10% of it.

 

All signs indicate that data volumes are growing at an unmanageable pace. In “traditional” networks, data quality challenges are already pervasive, and they are likely to accelerate exponentially based on predictions for growth of IoT devices.

 

These predictions are telling us that immediate action must be taken to address data quality challenges. For organizations or service providers to reap any value from this brave new world, strategies must be in place now. Otherwise, IT Operations Management (ITOM) and IT Asset Management (ITAM) initiatives will struggle to reach their goals.

 

The strategies to drive data quality improvement must account for the full lifecycle of the data and be able to handle the predicted exponential growth.

 

These strategies can be grouped into three main categories:

 

  • Gathering/Aggregation
  • Processing/Normalization
  • Sharing/Promotion

 

Gathering/Aggregation

 

The efforts to gather or aggregate data from various sources will become more challenging because the number of devices or “things” is growing at a previously unimaginable rate. Data about these devices, if it exists, typically comes through a device-specific management system where aggregation is handled. The level of granularity needed, however, is generally not there, which implies we need to put technologies and solutions in place to handle the data associated with these discrete devices as they come online. These solutions must aggregate incredibly high volumes of data from the countless new end-points.

 

Processing/Normalization

 

The second strategy is associated with how data is handled once it’s collected. There are many aspects to this, depending on the organization or service provider and what it desires. Normalization is certainly one area which cannot be avoided and is vital to downstream use. Another is detailed analytics to help decipher and explain the associated metadata, as well as to determine what data sources could potentially be discarded. These decisions will happen during a period of time based on reliability and quality metrics. Lastly, prioritization and precedence must be factored into how data is handled. With high volumes of data, it’s important to understand which might displace the other based on their quality, and which might override the other if there is a conflict.

 

Sharing/Promotion

 

The last category is the ability to share or promote processed data in a way that allows full use by consumers. Even when the previous two strategies are in place, a lack of integration with the final sources can undermine the entire data quality improvement effort. Given the dynamic environment in organizations and service providers today, there must be a very broad and flexible mechanism that shares and promotes data after it’s been processed.

 

Be Prepared

 

Data quality improvement initiatives are not new, and there are many techniques being used successfully today. The question is whether those in use can scale to handle the predicted explosion in growth. Take a look at your data quality initiatives and make these determinations before the wave of IoT data fully consumes your resources. Determine which of the three areas is weakest and put plans in place to address it, then move to the other two. You can’t wait to see what happens and risk the failure of current initiatives, such as ITOM and ITAM. They’re too important to your organizational success not to put strategic plans in place to handle the predicted data volume growth.

 

Data, their sources, and their management have a broad, deep and integral effect on our day-to-day work. Given the trends that are affecting us, there is nothing more critical to the long-term success of IT and the lines of business it supports. For more information on how to stay one step ahead of the data deluge, we invite you to check Blazent’s approach to data quality management as a service, described in the white paper linked here.

 

References:

 

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240217788/Data-set-to-grow-10-fold-by-2020-as-internet-of-things-takes-off

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3165317

http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-internet-of-things-and-big-data-unlocking-the-power/

http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-devices/gartner-21-billion-iot-devices-to-invade-by-2020/d/d-id/1323081