New innovations lead to new trends for decision-makers to consider for use within their current infrastructure and environment. The last few years have seen increased interest in emerging tech, such as the Internet of Things, Big Data, and Security. We looked at research conducted by Venture Beat, Gartner, and Statista to see where these trends stand now:

Emerging Trend Statistics

As the statistics above demonstrate, IoT, big data, and security are percieved as rising innovations, projected to bring untold benefits to businesses. But where do these new technologies stand when it comes to the reality of the how and why organizations are using them?

Where do businesses stand on IoT?

For businesses, the Internet of Things provides not only growing profits and revenue, but new opportunities into artificial intelligence (AI), predictive maintenance, tracking, and sensor usage. As stated earlier, research has shown that there will be nearly 25 billion devices will be connected by 2020, resulting in over $1.9 trillion dollars in economic benefits.

Businesses using IoT have experienced a boost within their revenue streams. IoT also introduces new pathways to some key beneifts:

Better understand customers and their preferences
Improving the customer experience
Creating new business lines
Greater efficiencies, flexibility, and agility

We’ve taken a look at why the customer experience has become integral to businesses and marketers alike, and how traditional methods of reaching or exceeding their expectations has changed. The is where IoT and its capability to not just harness the growing connection of connected devices, but to also collect meaningful data, especially in how customers are using it, is valuable in improving processes and outcomes.

Understanding the new dimensions of customers helps businesses reevaluate their products and services to meet more of the demand and need of a customer. Personalization, already a huge trend, is expected to become even more critical to success in the approaching era of IoT digital marketing. For instance, personalization provides customers quick access to information regarding their recent purchases and preferences. Businesses, such as Amazon, utilize this approach to recommend other items based on those purchases.

While IoT isn’t a staple in every single business, interest is growing, paticularly in industries such as manufacturing, travel, healthcare, and retail. For manufacturing and healthcare, the adoption of IoT is resulting in better paths of safety and patient outcomes, while travel and retail are using it to improve the customer and guest experience overall..

Is Big Data Really a Trend?

Absolutely! Data isn’t just files and documents – data includes everything from a word document to a social post to a video. As previously stated above, 300 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube every minute. As with IoT, the potential of big data in terms of helping organizations gain more efficient, effective, and accurate perceptions on their business, their employees, and their customers.

By 2020, the accumulated volume of big data will increase from 4.4 zettabytes to roughly 44 zettabytes or 44 trillion GB. IT departments currently struggle with the increasing growth of data in terms of where to store it and how it can be used for deeper insights and outcomes. IoT platforms help create and manage applications which can run analytics, store and secure data.

In the scope of big data, those companies who are using it are seeing valuable results:

Big data, like IoT, possesses great potential when it comes to informing business decisions. However, while businesses are aware of the impacts, they aren’t quite there in terms of actively using applications to look at their data or they aren’t quite sure of the overwhelming scope big data represents and in how to keep it secure.

Currently, Big Data companies are only just becoming capable of handling this immense amount of data, coming in from IoT devices, in a highly secure manner. The change we are expecting on the Big Data front would be the adoption of flexible and scalable solutions to enhance security, data storing, and data analysis capabilities. IoT is one of the biggest emerging technologies of this era and its wide adoption is sending signals to Big Data organizations to be ready to handle data of varied types coming in from different types of devices.

Of course, Security is a Key Trend - but is it really affecting EVERYTHING?

Yes! Since 2013, experts have coined each year the ‘year of the hack’. Many high profile enterprises and corporations were victims of data breaches, malicious software, or ransomware. In the face of such high profile cases, businesses know they must protect their critical data, information, and systems from both internal and external sources.

The cost of a breach, depending on the industry, can be upwards of $14 million dollars and is just one aspect of a cyberthreat aftermath. Loss of trust from customers and shareholders, especially if the organization didn’t reveal the attack or did not respond in a timely manner, can damage or even ruin a business. Research has shown the following results:

70% of small businesses go out of business within a year of a major data loss
80% of companies that don’t recover from a catastrophic data loss go out of business within a month
75% of companies without business continuity plans go out of business within 3 years of a disaster

The ability to come back from a disaster is paramount and as shown, can not be ignored. Disaster recovery, business continuity, and high availability solutions are being used to prevent the worst-case scenario, and disaster plans are created to reduce the amount of downtime in the case an organization is attacked.

Is there more reality than hype in IoT, Big Data and/or Security Impacts?

Just a few years ago, IoT, big data, and - to some point - data security weren’t seen as major drivers of core business decisions. However, the growth of data, acompanied by new technologies and systems, have changed these perceptions. These factors are becoming primary drivers of a host of buying decisions, even for things that don't seem dependent on them.

Today marketers, executives and IT professionals aike are highly interested in these innovations and are looking for solutions that can deliver results and successful deployments of initiatives. In fact, all three of these technologies can be used to further your business initiatives when taken together – security, big data, and IoT. Marketers should take advantage of this interest to help educate their customers on the use of these three innovations.

If you need assistance speaking to clients about new technologies, please contact us.

Resources:

20 Impressive Internet of Things Statistics and Facts (2019)

13 IoT Statistics Defining the Future of Internet of Things

5 IoT Statistics You Need to Know in 2019

Internet of Things – The New Government to Business Platform

21 Big Data Statistics and Predictions on the Future of Big Data

Volume of data/information created worldwide from 2005 to 2025

Five ways the Internet of Things is transforming businesses today

Don’t Wait! These 5 IoT Small Business App Are Ready Today

How to Use IoT to Stand Out in Your Business?

5 Ways IoT is Reinventing Business Today