Analyst and forecaster ABI Research has predicted a growth of 800% in data captured by IoT connections by 2020 as analytics evolve from cloud to edge.
Last year, IoT-connected devices exceeded 200 exabytes in 2014 and ABI estimates that value to surpass 1,600 exabytes (1.6 zettabytes) by the end of this decade.
With current deployment architectures being moved from cloud to edge computing, IoT is experiencing a major evolution within itself.
By distributing the analytic workloads across the network, this shift is opening up edge-based data to meaningful analysis.
It is also shoring up the cloud-level capabilities by making the transmitted data more actionable, by enriching and contextualising the payloads.
Principal Analyst Aapo Markkanen said: "The yearly volumes that are generated within endpoints are counted in yottabytes, but only a tiny fraction of this vast data mass is actually being captured for storage or further analysis.
"And of the captured volume, on average over 90% is stored or processed locally without a cloud element, even though this ratio can vary greatly by application segment. So far, the locally dealt data has typically been largely inaccessible for analytics, but that is now starting to change."
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Practice Director Dan Shey said: "Edge computing is a huge challenge for the entire IoT value chain, as we can see from the way that cloud platforms, analytics vendors, and gateway suppliers are scrambling to collaborate with each other.
"It is also a great opportunity for various software and hardware players that have been working towards this goal even far before the IoT as a concept became fashionable. Names like AGT International, Eurotech, Kepware Technologies, OSIsoft, and Panduit are all examples of firms whose background in distributed intelligence allows them now to expand their target market, even significantly."
