The Great Build-Out: Infrastructure Needed For The Internet Of Things

I love the first line of this Gigaom article: “Infrastructure is something that people are used to not thinking about.” But ignoring infrastructure is not an option when it comes to supporting the Internet of Things (IoT). Consider the numbers. Currently, humans generate about 2.8 zettabytes of data a year. That’s 2.8 trillion gigabytes of emails, tweets, search queries, Facebook posts and online purchases. That number is expected to double every two or three years.

Add to that devices, sensors and other sources of machine data. Pundits project there will be more devices added to the Internet than people in the coming decade. By 2020, we’re expecting to have anywhere from 26 billion devices connected to the Internet, on up to 50 billion or even 200 billion.

What’s it going to take, to build an infrastructure robust enough to handle that volume of data? That’s the main topic at the Gigaom Structure conference  coming to San Francisco on June 18...