IDC has issued a new forecast for IoT saying it estimates there will be 41.6b IoT devices connected to the Internet by 2025 generating 79.4 zettabytes (1021 bytes) of data — the bulk of it from video surveillance applications — representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.7 percent from 2018.
IDC says industrial and automotive equipment will see the fastest data growth rate over the forecast period with a CAGR of 60 percent and represents the largest opportunity of connected ‘things’, but it expects to see strong adoption of household and wearable devices in the near term.
It says growth in the industrial and automotive category is the result of the increasing number of things other than video surveillance cameras that are capturing data continuously as well as more advanced sensors capturing more and richer metrics or machine functions.
However, “Over the longer term … with public safety concerns, decreasing camera costs, and higher bandwidth options available (including the deployment of 5G networks offering low latency, dense coverage, and high bandwidth), video surveillance will grow in adoption at a rapid rate.”
Drones driving data
IDC adds, “Drones, while still early in adoption today, show great potential to access remote or hard to reach locations and will also be a big driver of data creation using cameras.”
IDC says also that the IoT metadata category is a growing source of data to be managed and leveraged.
“Metadata, compared with original source files like a video image, is very small, sometimes by orders of magnitude. In other cases, however, metadata can mimic the size of the source file, such as in manufacturing environment.
The value of metadata
“In all cases, metadata is valuable data that can be leveraged to inform intelligent systems, drive personalisation, or bring context to seemingly random scenarios or data sets. In other words, metadata is a prime candidate to be fed into NoSQL databases like MongoDB to bring structure to unstructured content or fed into cognitive systems to bring new levels of understanding, intelligence, and order to outwardly random environments.”
