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Security and infrastructure are the two main pain points for almost half of Australian commercial enterprises that are looking to expand their Internet of Things (IoT) systems, according to a new survey.
Findings from IDC's 2018-2019 Global IoT Decision Maker Survey report that 46.5 per cent of Australian enterprises have deployed at least one IoT solution, and are planning on branching out further in the near future.
The report focuses on Australian organisations that have deployed IoT initiatives or are planning to deploy in the next two years, understanding their plans, influences, challenges, success, infrastructure and vendor mindshare.
According to Monica Collier - practice research manager of Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) at IDC - Australian companies are trying to use IoT data to generate insights about new product development and to improve customer service but are struggling to find useful insights within the data collected.
As a result, Collier said companies face issues with data integration and have problems capturing enough data for the analytics to be meaningful.
"Many Australian enterprises told IDC that they want IoT vendors to improve their analytics and data visualisation offerings, so that the systems provide greater value ‘out of the box’," Collier added. "However, companies also need to be realistic and not aim too high when first deploying new systems.
"Leveraging the data to get closer to customers and creating new business models is what really excites people about IoT, but to start with, analytics is about operational efficiencies and productivity gains."
In order to move past the barriers inhibiting production scale IoT, organisations have to solve the broader security and upgrade issues, Collier said.
“At the same time, IoT vendors need to be supporting enterprises with IoT security expertise, more comprehensive analytics and helping measure how solutions are performing against business requirements," she said.
