Is IoT Data a New “Natural” Resource?
As an estimated 50 billion connected devices come online over the next three years, questions about who owns machine-generated data, and under what terms it’s shared with others, will assume unprecedented importance. As of today, there are no standards and few consistent practices for use of IoT data.
Beyond data privacy, which alone is a massive issue with the IoT, data ownership is drawing much attention from industry experts. Every application of the IoT across industries involves harnessing huge quantities of raw data and feeding it into systems to manufacture new insights and to derive new business value.
When you step back and consider where IoT data is going, it begins to look a lot like raw natural resources.
Follow this thinking. Raw data is extracted from connected devices, carried across communication channels, feed into business intelligence applications for cleaning, manipulation, and refinement to ultimately manufacture something new — information. This process resembles the mining natural resources from the environment into production systems and then onto market. How does ownership this supply chain relate to data ownership in the IoT one?
As the article below states, “One is that a lot more data can now be captured from connected devices. Gartner Inc. has forecast that 75 percent of enterprise-generated data will be created outside the data center by 2022, up from 10 percent today. Much of that data will be stored in the cloud, where it can be easily shared and combined with other sources. Big data and analytics are also unlocking value in massive information stores that couldn’t be easily accessed just a few years ago.”
We are looking at a whole new infrastructure required simply for the management of data ownership. This is a space to watch as the Internet of Things continues to expand in the next several years.
Originally published at IoT Sources.
