Aggressive, short term expectations for pay back on enterprise IoT deployments
Security and value justification remain the biggest obstacles to Internet of Things (IoT) project deployment by enterprises, according to a new survey.
In a global survey of over 1,000 enterprises by Current Analysis, ‘security concerns’ ranked the number one IoT deployment challenge, followed by proving the value of IoT projects to key stakeholders, privacy concerns and return on investment (ROI) justifications. In total, over 50% of businesses expect ROI in less than one year.
While the results differed from region to region – the need to prove out an IoT project’s ROI, for example, was outsized in North America – the importance of security, privacy and IoT value justification versus technical or organisational issues generally held across all geographies.
IoT project costs and ROI justification may trail security as an obstacle to deployment, but for enterprises who opted against moving forward with IoT projects, ‘costs’ were the number one reason, followed closely by lack of compelling use cases and security concerns.
Where justifying a project will depend on ROI timescale goals, it is telling that more than 50% of enterprises hope for a payoff in under a year, said Current Analysis. For many projects, this may well be overly optimistic or otherwise unrealistic.
Encouragingly, however, nearly 70% of enterprises who had already implemented an IoT solution indicate that the project had already met their ROI expectations, regardless of the initial goals.
“The speed with which many organizations require IoT implementations to at least pay for themselves is eye-popping, but also a clear sign that IoT in the enterprise is well beyond hype and into the realm of the actual,” said Jerry Caron, senior vice president for analysis at Current Analysis. “Businesses have no patience for projects that don’t pull their weight, and clearly many believe that they are not just take a speculative gamble with their IoT plans,” he added.
