Leveraging IoT for Opening New Lines of Business

April 10, 2019

According to Markets and Markets, the Internet of Things (IoT) Market will be worth $561.04 Billion USD by 2022. That figure shows a clear potential for monetizing sensor data as IoT adoption grows. As businesses sprout new branches and sensors grow beyond the network edge, the combination of IoT and the colocation data center will play a growing role in creating new lines of business.

Most smart devices in use today are in factories, businesses, and healthcare with many sectors working on harnessing sensor data for internal enterprise gain. Those sectors are also looking for ways to use that data externally in both B2B and B2C monetization streams. This is leading them to explore business collaborations across and between sectors to leverage IoT in new profitable ways.

How the Colocation Data Center Meets IoT Challenges

There are at least three big challenges associated with using IoT data to open new lines of business. They are all issues associated with real-time access and moving data to a centralized cloud data center. The nature of monetizing sensor data requires dealing with the following challenges:

Security
Latency
Privacy

Businesses understand that it’s possible to address all three issues by harnessing, analyzing and storing sensor-produced data at the network edge where it’s closer to its point of origin.

That’s why the role of the colocation data center in IoT and big data is limitless for countless businesses. This ranges across sectors as diverse as energy, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, smart homes, and many others. This opportunity exists because colocation service providers are in a unique position to offer businesses lots of options for cost effectively dealing with sensor data including:

Harnessing
Storage
Analysis
Anonymization
Selling
Sharing
Collaborative use

Having access to a network of cloud data centers to make these data usage models more viable frees businesses to explore countless options for opening new business lines through selling, sharing and collaborative use of data. With access to a global network of cloud data centers, businesses can harness local and global market benefits.

How Colocation Data Center Providers Open IoT Business Opportunities

As companies see the untapped value of their data beyond their own use, data exchanges are springing up where companies can license their data to third parties to open new revenue streams. Data exchanges enable companies to buy, sell, share and subscribe to data sets derived from IoT sensors.

A colocation data center network makes it easier for companies to harness sensor data closer to the source. It also streamlines the connection to data-intensive IoT applications. By putting compute and storage resources closer to the network edge in colocation data centers, IoT data stays in closer proximity to where it is generated.

This results in lower cost and latency for transport, storage, and processing while increasing security of the sensor data. The combination of benefits opens the door to creating opportunities for opening new business lines.

These collaborators are often in different but complimentary industries that can use that data in different ways. This convergence of cloud, edge, and colocation data center providers are the future of distributed computing and the growth of IoT monetization, collaboration and exchanges.

While communication and content providers may seem to have the clearest path to using IoT data for new lines of business, opportunities abound across countless sectors. All that is needed is for companies to take a broader view of their data and look for opportunities such as:

Hardware as a service
Pay per use
Performance-based contracting

These are only a few possible examples. New business lines can also come from forming more complex product and service offerings that rely on business partnerships to cover all the steps of the data value chain. These partners can include:

Analytics providers
Digital platform providers
Data brokers
Media companies
Content providers
Car manufacturers
Insurers
Service providers
Retailers and many more

Colocation data center providers can deliver endless possibilities for building the infrastructure to enable new lines of business and monetization based on IoT data. With the right colocation solutions, businesses can develop an IoT strategy that goes beyond internal data use today to providing the engine for opening new lines of business tomorrow.