The company surveyed more than 3,000 IoT decision-makers

IoT: what holds companies back – Microsoft’ report. Source:?shutterstock.com

Microsoft has launched a new annual report –?IoT Signals?– that provides an industry pulse on the state of IoT adoption to help inform how we better serve our partners and customers, as well as help business leaders in development of their own IoT strategies. The company surveyed more than 3,000 IoT decision-makers in enterprise organizations to give the industry a holistic, market-level view of the IoT ecosystem, including adoption rates, related technology trends, challenges and benefits of IoT.

What the study found is that while IoT adoption is on the rise and opening the door to business transformation, companies are being held back by skills shortages, project complexity and security challenges. To summarize the findings:

• IoT is seen as profitable and critical to business success and is creating opportunities to leverage more advanced cloud and networking technologies.?Nearly nine in 10 (85%) surveyed are in IoT adoption and 88% see IoT as critical to business success.
• Nearly all respondents (97%) have security concerns when implementing IoT. The top three security concerns found among IoT adopters are: creating strong user authentications (43%), tracking and managing each IoT device (38%) and securing endpoints for each IoT device (38%).
• There is a skills gap for IoT solutions which is compounded by solution complexity. Almost half (47%) say there are not enough available skilled workers and one in four (38%) IoT adopters cite complexity/technical challenges to using IoT as a barrier to further their IoT adoption. Existing IoT complexities and lack of resources prevent IoT decision-makers from more IoT adoption, and 20% cite complexity/technical challenges as a top challenge.

Check out more insights here.

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