Over three quarters of companies and business across the EU have implemented budget increases for their IT and technology departments in 2018, a new report from Toshiba that surveyed over a 1000 key thinkers across the public and private sectors found.
A positive outlook on 5G also shone through, with 78 percent of respondents saying its introduction will “enable them to improve or develop new customer offerings.’’
Trials of 5G in industry have already started in 2018, while on the consumer side a UK government investigation noted: “There is broad consensus that commercial roll out of 5G in the UK should begin by 2020’’
Toshiba found that a large proportion of the budget increases will be invested in data protection and wearable devices. This comes as 82% of enterprises foresee that they will have to incorporate some form of smart glass device into their workforce over the next three years.
When the report queried those in companies with over 500 employees 24% responded that they believe; ‘’a smart glasses solution will be rolled out for employees within the next 12 months.’’
The Edge
Edge computing is also cited as a future cost saving technology; ‘’5.6 Billion business-owned devices will be using edge computing for data collection and processing by 2020.’’
Edge computing is the practice of making the devices in your Internet of things eco-system smarter by giving them more intelligence.
For instance a security camera via a motion sensor detector and other capabilities can decide for itself what feed needs to be loaded to the cloud.
While one cameras data upload may be small, 300 can be a strain on your private network or cloud capacity. This type of on-board regulation can greatly reduce the strain on your IT services. The report found that; ‘’30 per cent of IT decision makers say managing strain on the cloud is one of the biggest challenges of managing M2M/IoT data, while 48 per cent say handling this data in a secure manner is a concern.’’
The increasing mobility of workforce’s is highlighted as; ‘’68% of respondents said at least a tenth of their employees work primarily while travelling or in no fixed location.’’ When discussing what measures they hope to innate to increases productivity of mobile workforce, 47% said that proving the right digital tools was important, while 47 per cent noted that proper training of employees was; ‘’critical’’
