The survey – the Internet of Things Business Index 2017 – was compiled from the responses of 825 companies around the world. Amongst the findings was that one in five respondents hadn’t started to think about how they might use the IoT internally and externally, with 9% saying the IoT will have no impact on their businesses and never will.
Pete Swabey, EIU editorial director, EMEA, admitted the results hadn’t matched the expectations of the previous EIU report into the IoT, published in 2013. “While the IoT hasn’t advanced as many would have expected, companies are now in a better position and this will translate into more visible implementations in the next three years.”
The report was co-sponsored by ARM and IBM. Mike Muller, ARM’s chief technology officer, said: “The real challenge in the last three years has been moving people from talking about the IoT to doing something about it. What we’ve seen in that transition is companies starting to worry about security and cost.
“It’s not just the cost of buying equipment,” he continued, “it’s also the internal organisational challenges. Nevertheless, people are still investing and see there’s money to be made; whether that’s from cost savings or more revenue.”
In fact, the report found 29% of respondents worried about high investment costs and 26% concerned about security. Muller pointed out that ARM had done things in hardware to make sure chips featuring its technology were more secure. “But deploying IoT systems is about secure architectures,” he noted. “Companies have to move from a ‘deploy and forget’ approach to one where they have to manage devices actively. They have to approach the IoT with the mindset that they will be hacked and need to know how to recover hacked devices.”