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.
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.
“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,” said Josh Builta, Director of Research, Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence at Omdia.
“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.”