25 billion connected things will be in use by 2021: Gartner

The number of connected things in use will go up to 25 billion by 2021, from 14.2 billion in 2019, according to a Gartner forecast on Friday.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand, the need for a governance framework that ensures appropriate behaviour in the creation, storage, use and deletion of information related to IoT projects will become increasingly important, Gartner said in its report titled “Top Strategic IoT Trends and Technologies Through 2023.”

“The IoT will continue to deliver new opportunities for digital business innovation for the next decade, many of which will be enabled by new or improved technologies,” said Nick Jones, Research Vice President at Gartner.

“CIOs who master innovative IoT trends have the opportunity to lead digital innovation in their business,” Jones added.

By 2023, it is expected that new special-purpose chips will reduce the power consumption required to run a deep neural networks (DNN), enabling new edge architectures and embedded DNN functions in low-power IoT endpoints, the report said.

This will support new capabilities such as data analytics integrated with sensors, and speech recognition included in low cost battery-powered devices.

“Currently, most IoT endpoint devices use conventional processor chips, with low-power ARM architectures being particularly popular. However, traditional instruction sets and memory architectures aren’t well-suited to all the tasks that endpoints need to perform,” said Jones.

“For example, the performance of DNNs is often limited by memory bandwidth, rather than processing power,” he added.