The Internet of Things has contributed to an explosion in the amount of data being stored by enterprises. Now, those same enterprises are beginning to invest heavily in their infrastructure to extract value from that data.

That’s the biggest takeaway from analyst firm 451 Research Inc.’s latest report, Voice of the Enterprise: IoT Workloads and Key Projects, which found that most organizations are planning to up their spending on IoT projects or maintain it at the same level. Some 65 percent of companies said they’re planning to increase IoT spending, while just 2.7 percent said they would reduce it.

As to where that spending will go, the report found that 32 percent of enterprises are currently planning to boost their storage capacity within the next 12 months. In the same period, 30 percent of firms will increase spending on network edge equipment, while 29 percent plan to boost spending on servers, and 27 percent will increase their investments in off-premises cloud infrastructure.

The report also looked at where companies are storing their IoT data. It found that 53 percent of organizations store it in-house, in on-premises data centers, while 59 percent also analyze their data on-premises.

Of those that store IoT data on-premises, around two-thirds said it will remain there for the duration of its lifespan, while the remainder said they eventually plan to move it to public clouds. The public cloud is more suitable for housing IoT data for historical use cases such as regulatory reporting and trend analysis because of its flexibility and cost saving benefits, the report noted.

There’s also a lot of data processing going on at the network edge. Just under half of firms surveyed said that data analysis, aggregation and filtering takes place on the IoT device, or on infrastructure located nearby.

“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,” said Rich Karpinski, research director for the report. “While some enterprises say that in the future they will do more analytics — including heavy data processing and analysis driven by big data or AI — at the network edge, for now that deeper analysis is happening in company-owned datacenters or in the public cloud.”

The report also found that most organizations are using IoT data primarily to improve their IT processes, particularly with regard to data center management, surveillance and security monitoring. However, 451 Research said its data shows that facilities automation will become the main use case for IoT data within the next two years.

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