90% of Enterprises state that IoT was core to their digital transformation plans or being deployed across multiple areas of their organization, according to Omdia’s latest 2021 IoT Enterprise Survey.
The 2021 Global IoT Enterprise survey, now in its third consecutive year, also found IoT deployments are maturing within organizations, with 73% of respondents stating their projects were either in full deployment or trial/PoC stage, up 4% from last year. Enterprises are also increasing the number of projects, with almost 40% now deploying over 5 IoT projects within their organization, up 25% YoY, whilst only 5% are now deploying single use-case projects.
As project deployments continue to grow within organizations, investment in the technology is also on the rise. In the survey, 38% of respondents believed their organization’s IoT investment will exceed $1m in 2021, up from just 21% in 2020. The rise in investment correlates to growing confidence on the benefits of IoT projects. Nearly 50% of respondents stated they were already seeing improved efficiency or productivity gains as a result their IoT deployment, while a similar percentage stated they also achieved improvements to worker and facility safety. Another benefit that enterprises saw from IoT was improved energy efficiency, highlighting the increased importance of using IoT to meet sustainability targets.
Increased investment also appears to be leading to more internal IoT expertise within organizations. Lack of internal talent, one of last year’s top concerns, dropped to the ninth most pressing concern in 2021.
Concerns for IoT Deployment
However, alongside these positive signals, also lies consistent concerns. IoT ensuring data network and device security remains the number one challenge to IoT adoption within enterprise organizations. Security concerns have risen by 13% to 53% YoY, whilst data protection / governance concerns have grown by almost 20% from 31% to 50% over the past year.
Enterprise security concerns have been found to be evenly split across four key factors, 23% stating that lateral breaches caused by IoT network or device compromise could enable an adversary to access other devices / resources.
IoT device authentication / identity breaches rank second (22%) with major concerns of unauthorized devices signing onto the network to steal data. Ransomeware demand ranked third (20%) and DDos attacks ranked fourth (19%). When selecting a preferred supplier, 31% of enterprises stated that having integrated IoT security solutions was essential.
Complexity of integrating IoT projects within the business was the second major concern for organizations with 50% of respondents stating this was a critical issue, in the US however, this rose to 54% being the highest concern.
IoT Supplier & Tech preferences:
The largest portion of enterprise respondents identified large internet/ cloud service providers as their primary as the main IoT provider.The likes of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud increasing their market share to 42% in 2021, up from 27% in 2020.However, whilst the big players are increasing their market share, almost 46% of enterprises stated they are using multiple suppliers, up 9% YoY for their deployment needs.
Enterprises are now expecting vendors to have strong relationships / open APIs to enable cloud integration. This is due to the increase in data provided from IoT devices. Enterprises are looking to vendors that can analyze the data they collect and create a more proactive / predictive analysis, moving away from reactive solutions.
Josh Builta, Director of Research, Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence at Omdia commented:“IoT deployments across enterprises are continuing to rise year on year as enterprises become more familiar with the technologies available and the huge benefits IoT deployments can provide.
“While the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated almost half of all IoT projects, serious concerns around security, data privacy and governance still remain within many organizations. Over the next year as more enterprises see first-hand the direct correlation between IoT deployment and business efficiencies we expect IoT deployments to continue to accelerate. However, it is up to the vendors to communicate how they are managing and alleviating concerns around privacy and data protection. Once the vendors manage to demonstrate this fully, we expect IoT deployments within enterprises will grow exponentially over the next few years.”
