IoT — the idea that essentially any device that can be connected, will be connected — promises to open a brave new world of opportunity for retailers. And while consumers are enamored of the idea that their refrigerator will be connected to the home heating system which will be connected to the jacuzzi, IT departments and security experts are staring down a host of new threats.

Retail IT spending will see large growth associated with IoT spending, according to a new report from IDC. The IoT IT market associated with in-store consumer digital offers will grow from $181m in 2014 to $223m in 2018.

IDC predicts that the rise of IoT solutions will translate into billions of dollars of IT opportunity for vertical-solution focused vendors.

IoT also has the potential to transform the data center market, its customers and technology. The research firm estimates that the IoT will include 26 billion units installed by 2020, and by that time, IoT product and service suppliers will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300bn, mostly in services.

"IoT deployments will generate large quantities of data that need to be processed and analyzed in real time," said Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner. "Processing large quantities of IoT data in real time will increase as a proportion of workloads of data centers, leaving providers facing new security, capacity and analytics challenges."

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