The Internet of Things is one of the main forces which are going to drive the cloud in the coming years in your careers, workplaces, and organizations. It will even work the other way with the cloud helping the IoT move forward.

You would have probably heard a lot about the IoT already, but for most organizations, they will not be able to handle what’s going to happen next. There are terabytes of data that stream in, and there is a demand for analytical power at every stage. The big question is – how you can leverage all of this in order to deliver better responsiveness to customers?

Wearable computing devices are on the rise, and this has been quite well documented. But this is just one very small part of the data surge of the IoT. Let’s see how it is going to become a part of businesses in the future:

Connected Cars

Through connected vehicles – Car manufacturers are already transforming vehicles into computers on wheels. Insurers are adopting telematics aggressively where policyholders get discounts for letting them monitor their driving habits. Even fleet managers can now monitor movements and habits of drivers.

Travel Online

Companies in the entertainment and travel business can analyze and track customer preferences even when they are traveling. A recent paper by Google described how the Red Roof Inn group was able to match flight cancellations and delays to show mobile ads on their travelers’ phones so as to offer them lodging nearby.

Manufacturers have started monitoring products after sales in order to help their customers save energy costs and give predictive maintenance services.

Healthcare Market

Healthcare is getting disrupted in a number of ways because of an increase in types of connectivity and monitoring devices between healthcare providers, facilities, administrators, patients, etc. This is all made possible because of cloud computing and IoT. There is no medical facility which could do this on its own with systems on-premises.

These are just some of the examples from the many ways in which IoT data is now getting leveraged for new services and new business models.

Data Analysis

This also means there is a ton of data. Cisco says that 92 percent of all the workload today is born in the cloud and associated big data and IoT are the driving force behind the evolution. Analytics, database, and IoT workloads are going to account for around 22 percent of the business workload by 2020.

This is up from 2015 when it was 20 percent. By 2020, the amount of data generated by IoT will be 600 zetabytes which are 275 times more than the projected traffic from the centers to the end users and 39 times more than the total projected traffic from data centers.

Gulping all this data down means executives will have to take their IoT enterprises forward. They will have to choose between buying on-premises servers continuously to stay ahead of the surge or to contract cloud providers to take care of it for them. If they do choose to stick with the on-premises systems, at least having a contract with the clouds for handling workload spikes and surges, which is kind of a hybrid arrangement will be necessary.