The Internet of Things (IoT) has quickly gained a great deal of momentum and buzz amongst companies in a variety of fields over the past year. Up until now, the idea that all of our devices would be connected to one another and sharing data seemed like a far off idea that would take many years to come to fruition.
However due to new technologies quickly becoming more cost-effective and advances in the amount of environmental data that sensors are able to collect, the potential of IoT will likely come to be realized much sooner than many of us originally expected.
Morgan Stanley is projecting that within the next five years, as many as 75 billion devices will be communicating with each other using IoT technologies. As a result of this many companies are trying their best to prepare themselves to harness the power that a hyper connected world could bring to their businesses.
Nitin Rakesh, the CEO and president of the global IT and business solutions provider Syntel, believes that a tremendous amount of pressure is currently being put on companies to modernize and replace their legacy systems, because if they fail to do so they will be unable to handle growing consumer demand.
Rakesh sees legacy modernization as a means for companies to remain relevant as we shift towards a truly connected world. A gap will likely emerge between those companies that rely on legacy systems that are quickly becoming obsolete and those that have made the necessary investments to harness the power of the IoT in their businesses. This "Digital Disconnect" will make it especially harder for companies involved in healthcare, online insurance and manufacturing.
Syntel recommends a three-pronged approach for enterprises looking to modernize their operating systems and adopt new platforms. They should begin by evaluating legacy systems to see if automation can be applied to help manage business critical programs that can only be run on those machines.
Next, they should attempt to move all non-critical applications and assets to new more modern platforms. Finally in order to modernize their entire application environment the latest digital technologies should be overlaid on top of the entire environment.
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