Cisco has released the results of an international survey regarding digital readiness, and the findings suggest that IT leaders around the world are not yet convinced of the industry’s ability to drive digital transformation. And that’s bad news for IoT.
The premise of the survey is the much heralded “fourth era of industrial evolution”, which will be characterised by increased digitization. This will in turn rely on a combination of the Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, automation and machine learning. The result will be secure industrial connectivity, autonomic infrastructure and predictive ecosystems.
Cisco’s survey took into account the opinions of 2040 enterprise IT leaders across eight countries and eight industries. The complete results are being released gradually, but Cisco have revealed some interesting comparison points between the UK and Germany.
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UK and Germany lead the way on ‘Digital Readiness’
IT modernisation is multi-year effort, so understandably even the most advanced organisations are only a part of the way toward complete digital readiness. In the Cisco survey, the most advanced companies scored only 77 on a 100-point scale – results which suggest performance at the top is passable, but that there is significant room for improvement. The UK and Germany scored an average of 75 and 72 respectively.
Less advanced companies scored only 48 out of 100, and while this is a gap that can be closed, there’s no doubt that leaders have a significant advantage. As Cisco Vice President Inbar Lasser-Raab Cisco says in her blog post on the topic, ‘If your mantra is “only the paranoid survive,” then now is the time to start your IT transformation initiative.’
Factors hindering digital readiness highlighted by the survey are familiar, and include compliance to security policies, security itself, IT automation, and the time it takes to provision new infrastructure.
Integrating IoT is more complex than it appears
Speaking with Internet of Business, Daryl Miller, VP of Engineering at smart electronics company Lantronix, said: “Issues persist because integrating IoT connectivity into millions of existing enterprise and industrial devices is much more complex than it appears. The challenge is so difficult that many organisations attempt to build an IoT infrastructure from scratch, depleting a substantial amount of resources, only to fall short of their desired objectives. Companies need to keep the IoT simple by adapting their existing systems to become compatible with the IoT. This means that the functionality, design and continued use of critical systems won’t be impacted.”
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