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It's no secret that the Internet of Things (IoT) has lead to an explosion of data. In order to better manage that data, and get the most out of it, enterprise IT is making serious investments across its infrastructure stack.

According to a Tuesday report from 451 Research, some 32.4% of enterprise organizations are planning to increase their storage capacity over the next 12 months. Some 30.2% of organizations are planning to increase their network edge equipment over the next year, while 29.4% plan to increase server infrastructure, and 27.2% plan to increase off-premises cloud infrastructure.

The majority of respondents are planning to either increase their spending on IoT projects, or keep it the same, the report found. Of those surveyed, 65.6% planned to increase their spending on IoT over the next year, while only 2.7% were planning a reduction.

SEE: Special report: Harnessing IoT in the enterprise (free PDF)

In terms of storage, 53.1% of companies store their IoT data at a company-owned data center, while 59.1% analyze it there. Some two-thirds of respondents said that the data would remain there for its lifespan, but the other one-third said they eventually move it to the public cloud. Cloud storage was more often used for historical use cases such as "regulatory reporting and trend analysis," the report said, as it offers flexibility and cost savings.

Data processing is also happening at the edge, according to slightly fewer than half of the respondents. Analysis, aggregation, and filtering are happening on the IoT device (22.2%) or in IT infrastructure that is nearby (23.3%), respondents said.

"Companies are processing IoT workloads at the edge today to improve security, process real-time operational action triggers, and reduce IoT data storage and transport requirements," Rich Karpinski, research director for Voice of the Enterprise: Internet of Things, said in the report. "While some enterprises say that in the future they will do more analyticsincluding heavy data processing and analysis driven by big data or AIat the network edge, for now that deeper analysis is happening in company-owned datacenters or in the public cloud."

Most companies are using IoT to improve their IT processes, the report foundspecifically, data center management, surveillance, and security monitoring. Although, the report also noted that facilities automation will become the most popular use case within two years.

As the use cases for IoT continue to grow, so does demand for tech workers skilled in the areas relevant to IoT. Nearly 50% of survey respondents said that the struggle with a "skill shortage" for work in IoT.

Image: iStockphoto/chombosan

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Want to do IoT right? You'll need more storage, networking, servers, and cloud - TechRepublic

We generally think of a transformation to a hybrid infrastructure as one where you're going from a completely private setup to one that spans the public cloud and your private installation. But what if you started life as a small company with your systems entirely in the cloud? It's not an unusual approach, as running up your initial services in the cloud is straightforward and avoids a big capital outlay. As a company grows it's understandable that it might want to take on a private data centre, build an in-house support team and evolve to a two-site setup.

Step one is to consider why you're bothering with an on-premises setup instead of a second cloud instance. The answer will generally be that you want something that's closer to your office, with a potential performance improvement gained from such proximity. And that's fine what matters is that you've considered the options before deciding which way to go.

The next step is to think about where you'll host your private data centre. As you're already in the cloud, you have the opportunity to pick a data centre that's close (electronically speaking) to the cloud centre you're in. For example, you're probably aware that AWS provides a Direct Connect facility that lets you hook straight into their infrastructure rather than accessing your cloud world over the internet. Check out the locations and you'll see that the connectivity's hosted at 51 well-known locations Equinix in London, for example, or TierPoint in Seattle. Connectivity between your public and private components with a latency of just a few milliseconds is an attractive concept if you're looking for high availability with seamless failover.

Next, you'll need to think about the platform you're using. Most of the time you'll have used one or more of your cloud provider's standard operating system templates, so it makes sense to run your local stuff on the same operating system flavour if you can. And of course you should use the same CPU architecture where you can too, so you can be assured that your apps will be portable.

So you've sorted the platform. Now you need to decide whether the on-premises setup is to be your primary or secondary installation. If it's to be a secondary setup you should have a relatively straightforward job of adding new system and application-level components in as secondaries to your cloud-based apps.

If you decide to flip things around you'll have a more involved task of be shifting the primary apps over and redeploying the cloud setup as the secondary installation. Either way the happy news is that you've already gone through the non-trivial task of providing your office users with connectivity to the cloud installation, so hooking things up so they're able to get to the private data centre, regardless of whether it's the primary or the secondary, should be easier.

One further consideration with the choice of primary and secondary installations is the cost of data transfer. Shifting data out of a commercial cloud setup has a cost associated with it. Not a vast cost, I'll grant you, but one that you do need to keep an eye on. Using Amazon as an example, moving a terabyte per month over the internet from the cloud setup to your private installation will cost you $90. That's $900 for 10TB, or $7,800 for 100TB; even though the per-gigabyte cost tapers down, it doesn't ever tail off at zero. What does this mean? Easy: if the cloud setup is the primary and it's replicating application data to the private secondary, you're paying a chunk of cash for it to do so.

While we're on the subject of data transfer, you also need to figure out how you're going to do it. In these modern times, it's a relative doddle to set up the major cloud providers' storage instances so you can access them externally via standard protocols such as NFS. Alternatively you can look to the major storage vendors, who will sell you a funky gateway to install in your private data centre and handle the cloud magic for you.

The next consideration is licensing, and there are two aspects here. First is the basic fact that you'll need to buy operating system and/or application licences for your private setup sounds obvious but you may not ever have had to consider this if you were using a pay-as-you-go model with pre-configured cloud app servers. Second is that if you want to go for a clustered or active/passive application setup, you may need to revisit the versions you use on the cloud servers as well as buying licences for your private setup. Take SQL Server, for example: if you're running Standard Edition you can implement basic two-node high availability, but if you want something more advanced you'll need to upgrade to Enterprise Edition. Same with Oracle: if you want to enable Data Guard between sites that'll need Enterprise Edition too.

Lastly, but by no means least, is your internal support team. They've probably spent a number of years fettling your cloud installation and fixing stuff when it broke, but their skillset will be at worst lacking and at best out of date when it comes to hosting, networking, hardware and hypervisor support.

Be prepared to invest in training so that you can be confident that the new kit you're acquiring for your private data centre is properly supportable and hence properly supported. Yes, your typical infrastructure is easier to put together than it was a few years ago, but that doesn't mean it's trivial. And if you're virtualising your private data centre which you should getting the hypervisor layer running and optimised will take time, effort and skill.

Going from a cloud-centric setup to a hybrid infrastructure isn't rocket science, then which is no great surprise as any problem's tractable if you design, plan and implement the solution properly. But going from cloud to hybrid has some differences from going from private to hybrid.

So you just need to think a bit before you do it.

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So you're already in the cloud but need to come back down to Earth - The Register

By PATRICK LANG'ATMore by this Author

The Raila Odinga-led National Super Alliance (Nasa) has written to the electoral agency with 25 new demands that they say should be fulfilled in the October 17 fresh poll.

In a letter signed by Mr Odingas chief agent and Nasa co-principal Musalia Mudavadi, the opposition has demanded a full audit of the elections technology, full access to the servers, change of ballot printing firm, and the gazettement of new 290 constituency returning officers.

It is therefore inappropriate and foolhardy for the IEBC to embark on the planning of the fresh election without full compliance with the Orders of the Supreme Court in the redeployment of technology in the fresh presidential election. We therefore demand a full audit of technology in use in full compliance with the law, Mr Mudavadi said in the four-page letter.

The Nasa team has not only opposed the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission date for the repeat poll, it has also questioned why it narrowed the number of candidates to only Mr Odinga and President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Your interpretation that the election scheduled on the 17th October 2017 shall be in the style of a run-off contest of only two candidates is erroneous and unconstitutional. We also take reservation that you have not consulted the parties involved before making a determination on the date of the said election, Mr Mudavadi told IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati.

In the audit, Nasa has demanded a scrutiny they say should have full information on the ICT infrastructure, list of support partners and their respective Service Level Agreements, a detail of the firewall configuration, including ports configuration, as well as disclosure of all database transaction logs.

The team also wants a physical view and inspection of the IEBC servers, portal access to the cloud servers and IP addresses of all 20 servers; full access and copy of all servers and databases used by the IEBC; GPS coordinates of KIEMS; and Telkom and network structure with all service providers.

The opposition has also demanded the removal of senior personnel at the IEBC secretariat including Chief Executive Ezra Chiloba, his deputy Betty Nyabuto, James Muhati, the ICT director, Ms Immaculate Kassait, director of voter registration, Ms Praxedes Tororey, the head of legal team, with Mr Moses Kipkosgey being added to the earlier list.

Independence of the IEBC is not negotiable. Nasa coalition demands that fresh election should be administered by professional and non-partisan officials, Mr Mudavadi said.

"We demand that officials who are partisan or perceived as such should step aside and or be suspended during the planning and execution of the fresh election."

Further, the coalition demanded a full audit of the Sh3.8 billion 45,000 voter identification and results transmission kits that were provided by French-based Safran Morpho.

We demand that Safran and Oracle provide full implementation information in relation to their involvement in the General Election held on 8th August 2017, said Mr Mudavadi.

The team has also demanded a review of the voter register, and the 40,883 polling stations.

To enhance transparency, Nasa said the following specific demands must be met:

Appoint and gazette returning officers not among the Constituency Election Coordinators in consultations with political parties and candidates.

Establishment of a technical monitoring committee with representatives of the main political parties, coalitions or candidates to oversee implementation of the technology in use.

Stop use of Al-Ghurair to print ballot papers and results declaration forms

All Forms 34Bs should be pre-printed indicating the names of polling stations in the constituency and names of candidates

Elections results to be announced at the Constituency level. Results sent electronically must be accompanied by corresponding statutory result declaration forms

Candidates agents should be part of receiving teams at the constituency and national tallying centers, and be allowed to confirm entries before transmission

Establish defined roles of the security agencies and eliminate undue influence by the provincial administration and other public officials

Jubilee Party chose the October 17 date, claim Nasa leaders.

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Nasa: Our demands for repeat presidential election - Daily Nation