The world of Internet is steadily merging with the world of physical ‘things’. Because of this convergence the Internet of Things (IoT) has arisen, a giant global network connecting all web-enabled things, including people, in the World. From your fridge to your car to the cosmonaut orbiting around the earth, our virtual world will connect billions of smart devices with each other, creating an ecosystem where these ‘things’ will have ability to sense, interact and communicate with each other and influence actions with or without human intervention.

As of the year 2011, there are more Internet enabled devices in the world than actual human beings. And It is predicted by Statista, by 2020, the installed base of Internet of Things devices is forecast to grow to almost 31B worldwide. By 2025 the installed base of IoT devices will be over 75.4B devices. The enormous amount of data generated by these devices will obviously need to be stored and processed in data centers and will impact data center operations and the data center architectures.

What is the impact on Data Centers

Higher capacity per cabinet (high dense colocation) requests will grow. As more data is generated there will be a corresponding growth in demand for storage space and processing power.

Security and data privacy requirements will increase. With the number of connected devices increasing, the networks become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The security landscape must be designed to deal with this ever-growing range of cyber threats. Also as more personal data is digitized and stored, data centers need to ensure the highest level of data privacy and certifications.

Data center locations does matter. Currently, data centers drive efficiencies by building large, single location data centers. With the increate of IoT data will not be viable to transfer all this data to a centralized data center location. Data center owners will have to build localized data centers to handle and process the local data traffic.

Research firms like IDC and Garner estimates, that the global spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) will reach US$ 772.2B in 2018, an increase of 14,6% over the US$674B spent in 2017.