By 2020 there will be 30 billion connected things, according to a new infographic by Cloudera. The company believes that the Internet of Things (IoT) could be an extremely disruptive force in society, basically changing everything, according to Vijay Raja, Sr. Solutions Marketing Manager for Cloudera IoT.

“With billions of things — including everything from cars, homes, airplanes, apparels, parking meters, wearables, factories, oil rigs, and heavy machinery — connected to the internet, the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to be the most disruptive technological advances in recent ages.”

IoT is Really About the Data

Despite the name, IoT is less about things and more about the data that these things will be generating, with data streams in real-time that will need to be processed, calculated and computed into action items for both other things and humans.

“However, IoT is going to be much more than the things itself — IoT is really going to be all about the data!” says Raja. “IoT will generate far greater volume and variety of data than most information leaders are currently familiar with — requiring re-architecting of their existing data management infrastructures. Organizations around the globe will need to adopt a more scalable, agile, and open data management architecture in order to effectively ingest, store, manage, process and, more importantly, drive insights from all of their IoT data.”