Office equipment and printers are the top Internet of things (IOT) deployments by local organisations.
This emerged from the ITWeb/Infoblox 2015 Internet of things survey, which ran online during May. With the tremendous buzz around IOT, the survey was conducted to find out if South African enterprise networks are ready for a surge in IOT deployments.
The majority of survey respondents (72%) cited office equipment and printers as the top IOT deployments within their organisation, while office security came in as the second choice at 43%.
Cricket Liu, chief domain name system architect at Infoblox, says organisations should not be making a list of IOT devices to deploy, but should rather be determining what their business requirements are in this regard.
He believes if an organisation's business needs can be met by deploying a certain type of IOT device - sensors, security systems, etc - then the business should investigate the deployment of such.
The survey also determined that a third of respondents do not know how many IP addresses their organisation currently has on their network. Some 34% indicated their organisation has up to 100 addresses.
Liu says there are definite consequences of not knowing how many IP addresses the organisation may have.
"The corollary to this lack of knowledge is that presumably these organisations are not monitoring or managing their IOT devices either, which is disturbing," he adds.
Some 60% of respondents stated that operation efficiencies are their organisation's top driver to increase their use of IOT, cost efficiencies also ranked high at 57%, and 40% expressed their organisation's desire to collect more data across their business.
According to Liu, IOT devices can facilitate remote control and monitoring that might not be practical any other way.
Security concern
When asked what concerns respondents may have around IOT, over half (58%) cited security concerns. Budget constraints came in as the second-highest concern at 45%.
"The industry creating IOT devices needs to begin designing them with security in mind, and the Internet community and these manufacturers should embark on an effort to develop both protocols and best practices that will ease the development of secure IOT devices," Lui states.
According to the survey, 44% of respondents think their networking department will likely receive more budget in response to IOT requirements within the next year, while only a small percentage (4%) thinks it is not at all likely.
It also emerged 54% do not have sufficient policies in place to ensure their IOT deployments are compliant with their network architecture. Liu believes it is important for an organisation to have sufficient policies in place around IOT.
"Allowing IOT deployments to proceed without sufficient safeguards will lead to security and stability problems, not to mention a management nightmare," Liu concludes.
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