[ WhitePaper ]

IoT
5 PROOF
POINTS

THE INTERNET
OF THINGS IS
IMPACTING IT
IN 2015.

Your wearable device tells you exactly how much sleep you
got. You open the lock on your front door from an app on your
smartphone. Farms are automatically watered based on rainfall
data and weather conditions.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is here, and its helping healthcare
providers, farmers, manufacturers, teachers, firefighters, police,
transportation leaders and many more keep up with the world
around them. The connected home is available now, and cities
are on the horizon. Before we know it, we wont be able to
remember a time when our world wasnt completely connected.
In the meantime, adoption of IoT technology in the enterprise
continues to grow. This paper highlights recent research finding
about the ways IoT is impacting enterprise IT and service
providers today.

THE UPS AND

DOWNS OF IoT
TECHNOLOGY.

Just like a roller coaster, the IoT the network of physical objects
embedded with software and sensors that enables these objects
to exchange data is full of ups and downs. Gartners Hype Cycle
methodology does a good job of charting the peaks and valleys of this
kind of technology adoption.
IoT is at the same point as big data was five years ago, says Stefan
Schneider, SevOnes Product Marketing Manager. In a previous role,
Schneider was director of consulting for a large independent software
vendor that focused primarily on the IoT market.
Clearly, IoT has moved beyond the first step in the hype cycle the
technology trigger a time when proof-of-concept stories and media
interest trigger significant publicity, but few usable products exist.
Schneider feels IoT has transitioned into the second phase of the hype
cycle the peak of inflated expectations. This is the time when a few
progressive and risk-taking companies take action, but many do not.
If organizations are not yet engaged in IoT projects, they havent yet
come up with an answer to What benefit does connectivity offer to my
application?
Before IoT reaches mass adoption in the fifth and final step, it must go
through some growing pains. After phase 2, it will drop from its highest
point to the third step the trough of disillusionment. During this
time, experts say, interest in the technology wanes as experiments and
implementations fail to deliver.
Next, IoT is expected to breach the fourth step the slope of
enlightenment. This is the final step before mainstream adoption starts
to take off. During this time, experts expect to see a growing number of
instances of how the technology benefits the enterprise. At this point,
enterprises will fund IoT projects more and more, but conservative
companies will remain cautious.

IoT TODAY.

Machine to Machine (M2M) IoT think Uber and Square transactions

is already a reality. However, the business side of IoT smart cities,
smart meters, and the like needs to catch up. And according to
Schneider, it will and quickly.
While B2C and C2C IoT is not expected to see mainstream adoption for
another year, enterprises are starting to hire IoT professionals, even
though very few people in the space know yet how to translate the
technology into tangible business benefits.
In fact, just more than a quarter of enterprises recently surveyed by
SevOne said their IT teams are actively engaged in IoT projects. And for
many, the only way to move forward is to begin deploying IoT projects.
So, thats exactly what some cutting edge organizations are doing.
In September, 2015, SevOne published a report on recent survey
findings about the impact of IoT on enterprise IT and service provider
organizations.

Of the 100 executives surveyed:

. 91 percent work for firms in the Fortune 1000, with revenues in excess
of $1.5 billion.
. Respondents were predominantly senior decision makers 4 percent
are CEOs; 16 percent are VPs; 77 percent are directors; 3 percent are
managers.
. Participants represent various industries from financial services,
business services and high tech manufacturing, to healthcare, mining
and wholesale trade.

65 percent of respondents look forward to using IoT to achieve realtime visibility into conditions, but only 35 percent see it as a tool to
gain customer insights.
Amazon Web Services (37 percent), Microsoft (34 percent), and Azure
(34 percent) are supplying the IoT infrastructure to the surveyed firms.
Additionally, firms are monitoring the performance of various IoT
technologies, with 65 percent monitoring WiFi, 37 watching Bluetooth,
and 31 percent monitoring Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
Below are five proof points gathered from the survey data that reveal
ways IoT is impacting these IT teams.

[White Paper] 5 Proof Points the Internet of Things is Impacting IT in 2015 | PG 3

PROOF POINT 1

Most organizations have some level of interest in IoT

sensors, applications and devices.
Survey participants responded favorably when asked about their
interest in IoT, with 65 percent gauging their curiosity level between
somewhat interested and extremely interested.
The other 35 percent of businesses, Schneider said, might not yet have
an applicable use for IoT devices. And thats fine.
They dont have a business need for connected devices. Or maybe
they have a smartphone with a reader, but they dont consider it IoT.
Or they deploy an equipment team with smartphones and document
scanners or tablets. They dont yet see themselves as an IoT use case,
he said.

What is your current interest level in having IoT sensors,

applications, and devices in your business environment?

NOT
INTERESTED

10%
NEUTRAL

EXTREMELY
INTERESTED

9%

25%

VERY
INTERESTED

12%

SOMEWHAT
INTERESTED

44%

In the coming years, these companies that have not yet shown interest
in IoT will be late adopters. Every company needs to evaluate what
connected devices bring to their business.

[White Paper] 5 Proof Points the Internet of Things is Impacting IT in 2015 | PG 4

PROOF POINT 2

More than a quarter of IT teams are now actively

engaged in IoT projects.
Schneider said he was surprised that 26 percent of respondents said
they are engaging in IoT projects. He said he expected engagement to
be around 10 to 15 percent.
But its also important to note which organizations are participating
in the projects. At this early phase of the hype cycle, risk-taking
companies are much more willing to take a gamble on IoT, than
conservative companies.
The organizations that represented the 26 percent who are engaged
it IoT projects spanned a myriad of large industries from well-known
tech, communications and health enterprises, to universities, aircraft
manufacturers, and a few big banks.

Do you have active IoT projects?

YES,
BUDGETED

6%

YES,
PLANNED

7%
YES, IN
DEVELOPMENT

13%

NO, NOT YET

74%

[White Paper] 5 Proof Points the Internet of Things is Impacting IT in 2015 | PG 5

And just as the industries that have decided to board the IoT train differ,
so do the types of IoT projects they deploy. In April 2014, Computerworld
reporter Robert L. Mitchell detailed how Boeing plans to enable IoT projects.

As CIO at Boeing, Ted Colbert is no stranger to the Internet

of Things. For more than a decade, the aerospace giant has
deployed thousands of communications-enabled smart
devices to sense, control and exchange data across the
factory floor, on the battlefield, and within the companys
787 Dreamliner aircraft.
One executive that took part in SevOnes 2015 IoT survey cited
manufacturing floor automation as the companys current IoT project.
Efficiencies are required on the factory floor that can only be achieved by
robotics, said the executive. It benefits the business, and therefore, by
lowering overall manufacturing costs, the customer.
He also emphasized that pursuing IoT projects is very important to his
organization. [Well see] significant long term economic benefits on the
factory floor, as well as using RFID tags in the supply chain area, he said.
In August 2015, Fortune reporter Stacey Higginbotham reported on a $3
billion IoT deployment announcement from Intel in, saying, Like everyone
else, Intel is betting on the Internet of things to boost its marketing mojo.
In the article, he discussed how Intel plans to move away from just
focusing on helping businesses gather data from their existing sensors.
Still, until now, the emphasis at Intel has been squarely on corporate
uses and the influx of data that the IoT generates, he wrote. The
company doesnt just want to talk about the boring black computing
boxes it sells to enterprise customers, but also the sexy side of its
technology used, at least in theory, by people who like to tinker at home,
BMX bikers doing tricks and anything else that gets the media excited.

[White Paper] 7 Ways to Use Log Data for Proactive Performance Monitoring | PG 6

PROOF POINT 3

More than two thirds of businesses said they are

worried about the amount of data IoT applications
and services will generate.
Back to Computerworld reporter Robert Mitchell, who wrote that
Boeings CIO Ted Colbert, too, is worried about data collection.
Even seasoned veterans like Colbert are bracing for an onslaught,
says Mitchell. Whats different now is the accessibility of many
different types of data, the speed at which the data can be gathered,
and the tools a business can use to get its arms around that data. The
pace of development of sensors is moving much faster than folks can
keep up with.
When asked about the data generation aspects of IoT, 67 percent of
survey participants said they were concerned.
It may seem like when youre transmitting IoT data from point A
to point B, theres no need for concern. You just need to plan for
it in terms of bandwidth and data storage. However, even though
the individual data transmissions may be as small as 1 Kbps, when
you consider the frequency, randomness, and aggregate of all
transmissions, its easy to see why many are apprehensive.
Businesses worry about sending data every minute and wonder how
the backend structure can scale and how to treat and process the data.
Remember, the data exchanged per individual IoT instance is relatively
small, ranging from 1 to 100 Kbps. But it is constant. The sheer
volume of hundreds of small connections per second can give the IT
department much more to be concerned about.
With so many connected devices, the aggregate data increase will place
significant pressure on the network. In the past, many organizations
have side-stepped scalability challenges by choosing to monitor only
the important parts of the network, concentrating on the central parts
of the network and ignoring the edge.
However, with the profusion of IoT, and the criticality of the data it
creates, this is no longer an option. If the IT performance monitoring
platform cant intuitively and cost-effectively scale with the increase in
data, the organization risks creating a dangerous visibility gap.
The sensible approach is to build upon a performance monitoring
platform engineered for speed at scale. That means abandoning
products built around a centralized database architecture that will
eventually fold under the weight of massive data and leave you with
a product that fails to provide near real-time information about the
health of your infrastructure and IoT service delivery.
Instead, consider a monitoring platform based on a distributed
computing model. By keeping your performance data distributed
across your network, youre better equipped to handle the challenge of
massive data generated by the IoT.

[White Paper] 5 Proof Points the Internet of Things is Impacting IT in 2015 | PG 7

PROOF POINT 4

Nearly two thirds of businesses said IoT

deployments pose a security risk.
With a large number of devices that you may or may not manage,
you have limited visibility into how they are communicating
and you open your business up to risk, breeches, capacity and
performance issues and liability.

Businesses want to make sure no one is able to

access the service without authorization. The last
thing they want is for unauthorized devices or
people to dive into business-rich data.
Its crucial to secure the backend, since business sensitive
information is likely being stored and accessed from the cloud.
But businesses may also consider storing less business-critical
data in a secure area. An outsider who accesses your energy
records a seemingly harmless data set could easily deduce
when you are home and when you are not.
Eliminating that visibility gap is critical. Its not just about whether
your infrastructure is performing well, its about whether its
secure and uncompromised, too.
Making sure your Internet-connected devices are working
effectively involves a lot of proactive monitoring. These devices
are not permanently connected and their properties can change
at any time.
So, you must go deeper. Youll want to look at every layer of the
service to understand whats going on. Utilizing performance
monitoring can help by allowing you to apply a healthy dose of
analytics to find out whats normal and whats not.

[White Paper] 5 Proof Points the Internet of Things is Impacting IT in 2015 | PG 8

Regarding your network and IT infrastructure, which of the

following concern you about IoT?

IoT deployments pose a security risk

63%

IoT deployments create complexity in

monitoring inter-related applications

35%

Data generated by IoT deployments places

additional stress on our infrastructure

34%

IoT deployments create new

blind spots in our infrastructure

29%

People bringing their own IoT devices into

our locations creates capacity challenges

26%

Access to IoT systems stresses our

existing WiFi networks

25%
0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

[White Paper] 5 Proof Points the Internet of Things is Impacting IT in 2015 | PG 9

PROOF POINT 5

More than half of the businesses dont know who

will be responsible for ensuring the quality of IoT
applications
Although 33 percent of respondents reported that their firms
have assigned service assurance of IoT to their network team
and another 31 percent to their Operations team 53 percent
have not even determined who will be responsible for IoT quality.
Many organizations are deploying IoT projects for things like
environmental control, power, light, facilities management,
employee security and inventory tracking, just to name a few.
However, for many banks, trading firms and the like, there may
not yet be a use case for IoT in the workplace.

But just because you dont call and app IoT doesnt
mean you dont have bits and pieces of connected
devices. Most likely there are already people in your
organization that indirectly deploy IoT solutions for
connected devices.
Remember, IoT is only at the second stage of the hype cycle,
so theres still a long way to go before it reaches widespread
adoption. Leaders will figure out whom to give IoT projects to
first, and later waves of adopters will follow suit.

Which team(s) are or will be responsible for service assurance of

IoT deployments in your organization?

Not determined
at this time

53%

Network Team

33%
31%

Operations Team

16%

Server Team

7%

Dedicated IoT Team

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

[White Paper] 5 Proof Points the Internet of Things is Impacting IT in 2015 | PG 11

CONCLUSION.

No matter how you look at it, the numbers associated with IoT are
monstrous. For instance, many analysts conservatively anticipate that the
number of connected devices, including non-hub devices such as sensor
nodes and accessories, will more than double from 2015 to 2020.
Gartner predicts an even bigger leap in IoT connected devices. The
technology research and advisory company estimates that the number of
devices will quintuple from 4.9 billion devices in 2015 to 25 billion devices
by 2020.
In addition to the challenge posed by the volume of data these devices
generate and the additional load on the digital infrastructure, network
and IT teams will also have to monitor the performance of the devices
themselves.
This will force them to abandon traditional and less secure protocols
such as SNMP in favor of monitoring JSON or AMQP metrics. When gathering
performance metrics from IoT devices, organizations need to look for a
monitoring solution that takes a data agnostic approach to collection.
To learn more, download SevOnes whitepaper on How the IoT will Impact
Your Performance Monitoring Strategy.

About SevOne.
SevOne provides the worlds most scalable infrastructure performance monitoring platform to the worlds most connected companies.
The patented SevOne ClusterTM architecture leverages distributed computing to scale infinitely and collect millions of objects. It provides
real-time reporting down to the second and provides the insight needed to prevent outages. SevOne customers include seven of todays
13 largest banks, enterprises, CSPs, MSPs and MSOs. SevOne is backed by Bain Capital Ventures. More information can be found at
www.sevone.com. Follow SevOne on Twitter at @SevOneInc.

[ www.sevone.com | blog.sevone.com | info@sevone.com ]

SEV_WP_09_2015