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​Big data is a big miss when it comes to IoT: SAS

According to SAS, there is a misconception when it comes to the Internet of Things that the more data an organisation has the better, which often results in a surplus of unusable information.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor

When it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT), IoT Domain Lead at SAS Kevin Kalish has said that focusing on collecting big data often results in an organisation becoming a data hoarder.

Instead, Kalish believes the innovation gold lies in the filtered data an organisation has extracted from the intermediate layer between the devices and the cloud -- what he calls the "fog".

"The view of big data in IoT is that it is more a commodity and that sometimes can lead businesses to the desire to become a bit of a data hoarder," he said.

"The misconception is that storage is a commodity and big data will solve these problems but the volumes and the costs are quickly becoming unsustainable.

"Unless part of your business model is data monetisation, it's highly likely that you can afford to only send back filtered data."

In the future, Kalish believes there will be sensors in every imaginable place; that such a smart world is going to significantly change how an individual and an organisation should approach innovation, as well as how it connects to its customers and manages its day-to-day.

According to the self-confessed IoT evangelist, having more data attributes is not necessarily a good thing when an organisation is not 100 percent sure how it is going to accumulate and manage the data.

"When we talk about big data in the context of IoT, I actually think big data is a big miss because the focus, to a degree, has been and still is on storing the data cheaper," he said.

"IoT can either disrupt your business or it can help you be competitive within a business that is about to be disrupted."

By the end of 2016 some 6.4 billion "things" -- devices from toasters and kettles to cars and hospital equipment -- will be connected to the internet, according to analyst firm Gartner.

That figure represents a 30 percent rise from 2015 and Gartner expects this figure will grow further to reach 20.8 billion by 2020. By this year, as many as 5.5 million new things will become connected every day and as a result, the growing IoT will support total services spending of $235 billion in 2016, up 22 percent from 2015, the analyst predicted.

Previously, Vish Nandlall, Telstra's CTO, said that Australians are eager adopters of the IoT, networking their homes at twice the rate of Americans.

He said US homes had an average of four devices connected to the internet in 2014, a rate well below its tech-hungry Australian counterparts who have on average eight connected devices in their household.

The devices Australians do have are not terribly sexy, mainly comprising PCs, smartphones, and set-top boxes; however Nandlall believes the connection rate is an indicator of things to come.

"There's now an adoption from a behaviour perspective, that consumers will have more connected devices in their household that they might have had not even two or four years ago," he said.

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