Recent research has found security and value justification remain the biggest obstacles to IoT project deployment by enterprises.

The Current Analysis survey polled over 1000 enterprises across the globe (APAC, Europe, Middle East - Africa, North America, South - Central America) regarding their IoT plans and deployments, including: use case support, deployment interest level, expected benefits and deployment challenges, deployment scope and scale, connectivity and implementations, data analysis and collection, investment plans and RoI expectations, along with project management and vendor selection preferences.

The global survey revealed ‘security concerns' took the #1 spot for IoT deployment challenges, followed by proving the value of IoT projects to key stakeholders, privacy concerns and Return on Investment (RoI) justification.

While there were slight variations from region to region - the need to prove out an IoT project's RoI, for example, was outsized in North America – the importance of security/privacy and IoT value justification versus technical or organisational issues generally held across all geographies.

While IoT project costs and RoI justification may trail security as the most prominent obstacle to deployment, for enterprises who opted against moving forward with IoT projects ‘costs' were the #1 reason, followed closely by lack of compelling use cases and security concerns.

Where justifying a project will depend on RoI timescale goals, it's telling that more than 50% of enterprises hope for a payoff in under a year. For many projects, this may well be overly optimistic or otherwise unrealistic. Encouragingly, however, nearly 70% of enterprises who had already implemented an IoT solution indicate that the project had already met their RoI expectations, regardless of the initial goals.

“The speed with which many organisations require IoT implementations to at least pay for themselves is eye-popping, but also a clear sign that IoT in the enterprise is well beyond hype and into the realm of the actual,” says Jerry Caron, senior vice president, Analysis. “Businesses have no patience for projects that don't pull their weight, and clearly many believe that they are not just taking a speculative gamble with their IoT plans.