Has your company taken advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) to help analyse customer behaviour? Has your IT managed services team prepared you for the risks and the continuously growing data demands?
IoT enables everyday appliances and wearables to connect virtually to be able to help people utilize these objects with never before seen performance levels. But these technological improvements need a more efficient and smarter way of managing data so your business IT systems will not be overwhelmed with data overload. IT managed services groups should be getting ready with the intense data storage demands because the digital universe has showed a dramatic increase of 40% each year.
This year, more than 60% of businesses want to take advantage of Iot in analysing customer behaviour to be able to customise services, have quicker problem resolution turnaround times, and an all around higher customer satisfaction rating. Redshift Reasarch conducted a study that reveals that two thirds of the interviewed organisations plan to use Iot via mobile applications by mid 2016 and the rest are planning to do so by the end of the year. Your IT managed services group and can help upgrade and set up your IT systems to benefit from this trend but there are also risks involved.
There are numerous benefits from Iot like smarter offices and buildings, power reduction, better health, increased public safety just to name a few. All these wonderful benefits unfortunately come with risks that IT managed services teams should look out and prepare for – physical security and privacy, new features that will require unwarranted and unwanted surveillance, and new vulnerabilities to cyber attacks with possible huge ripple effects.
The coming digital transformation will unify IT and OT in fuelling a digitally enabled and mobile workforce. IT managed services teams should help deepen and expand their digitisation programs to make way for more cost-friendly connected sensors, ubiquitous and quicker communications, embedded control and intelligence, enhanced data analysis, and cloud infrastructure.
IoT brings about a web of webs of networks which size is unknown to IT managed services groups and all other tech savvy professionals. Every day, vulnerabilities and breakpoints are becoming known to the digital world. This complexity presents a developing value to the influx of data that we can’t define as of yet. This poses a challenge to IT managed services teams on how to protect your enterprise’s emergent properties in your endeavour to capitalize on the benefits of IoT.
Tech people say, as I am sure IT managed services consultants are also aware of, that petabyte sized (equivalent to 1024 Terabytes) data will soon be the digital world norm and it will become the brontobyte age before we know it. It is said that the largest challenge of organisations concerning data is how to properly analyse it and correlate important facts and retain accuracy as the volume of complex data increases.
1024 Terabytes is tantamount to I Petabyte
1024 Petabytes is tantamount to 1 Exabyte
1024 Exabytes is tantamount to 1 Zettabyte
1024 Zettabytes is tantamount to 1 Yottabyte
1024 Zettabytes is tantamount to 1 Brontobyte
So what can our IT managed services teams do to enhance our business network security? The first step is to build privacy and security into the network. It is critical to have all points covered, from devices, sensors, firmware, application, and data. It is imperative to create mechanisms for privacy interventions and process flow for security. Secondly, IT managed service groups should analyse IoT data and how it should be introduced to be able to make the proper operational adjustments to understand trends and provide insights to overall operations over your business network. Information from devices, nodes, and clusters should be observed to look for trends and scan for changes in order to be alert when there are exposures to new risks. Next, but not last, IT managed services teams should look into building specialised systems to control the influx of data. Your business should be proactive in managing your enterprise’s data privacy.
IT managed services groups are promptly adopting and creating ways to get ahead of the future concerns that IoT brings, especially when it comes to security solutions. It is as much of a human challenge as it is an IT challenge. Tighter control and specialised IT systems will help but we must also educate our staff and employees of the risks.
