Top technology trends we'll see in 2017 (part one)
February 6, 2017 6:30 AM
Top technology trends well see in 2017 (part one)
From artificial intelligence, to predictive analytics, to ransomware security, to the changing role of the chief data officer, tech leaders sound off on the top technology trends that we will see in 2017.
Predictive analytics and the power of the data scientist
The power of data is now a given among industries of all types and it will be a necessary tool in 2017, says Christian Gonzalez, CEO and co-founder of Wovenware. From biopharma and med device manufacturing, to retail and marketing, companies realize that data analytics is a key component of achieving business advantage. Advanced predictive analytics tools are enabling companies to not only measure the past but effectively create a road map for future choices by learning from previous situations. Since these solutions are only as good as the data they accumulate, the role of the data analysts and data scientists designing the algorithms and mining the data, will become as necessary as that of the HR manager, marketing head or CIO in the New Year.
Data mobility will become an even more massive issue
First, data in the cloud is prohibitively expensive to move to another cloud, says Varun Mehta, vice president of product operations at Nimble Storage. Second, because global organizations data now resides in multiple clouds and on-premises locations, they increasingly face serious problems ensuring that data is readily accessible by applications and end-users. And, finally, with Brexit complicating already complex data sovereignty laws in Europe, the ability to move data quickly from one location to another will become even more pressing for global companies. Expect CIOs to place data mobility at the top of their must-have list in 2017.
President Trump will change net neutrality
A Trump Administration is likely to ease net neutrality rules which could foster innovation in the mobile industry, cautions John Giere, president and chief executive officer at Openware Mobility. The regulatory shackles could come off and operators would be free to launch zero-rated plans. They could offer more unlimited services and provide consumers with better choice. On the other side of the Atlantic, how will net neutrality be approached in a post-Brexit Europe? Globally, other countries could replicate Americas net neutrality stance. 2017 heralds an unprecedented opportunity for mobility operators globally to boldly innovate with their pricing models.
Context- aware facilities grow in number
In 2016, we saw contextually-aware technology integrated into physical facilities, such as offices, campuses, banks and commuter hubs, explains Hossein Rahnama, CEO and founder of Flybits. Companies such as Vodafone, TD Bank and Ryerson University have already put this into place, enabling customers, students and employees to receive relevant information directly to their phone when they enter the facility without any searching involved. In the next year, we are going to see many more context-aware facilities emerge, particularly in the industrial, banking, and travel industries. Context-aware facilities are spaces that utilize and understand an individuals contextual and device data, including location, preferences, needs, settings and more, and can anticipate needs, uniquely interact and provide truly useful, intelligent, and personalized information in real-time. This provides users with a more seamless experience, and companies and organizations will rely on this much more in 2017 as a way to improve customer satisfaction.
Security and ease of access will drive adoption for hosted desktops apps
Although full adoption of hosted desktop applications is still two to three years away, we will see a spike in adoption rates in 2017, predicts Chanel Chambers, director of product marketing at Citrix. Concerns about security are top of mind for every size business this year and organizations will seek out ways to keep data safe without investing hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition, hosted desktops apps provide ease of access to company data, allowing employees to access their files from anywhere and any device.
The chief data officer position will pick up steam significantly
This is a sure sign of the pendulum swinging back: A company officer centrally managing the value of data, says Jake Freivald, vice president of marketing at Information Builders. And a CDO's job isn't to empower analysts per se, although that will often be part of what they do. If that were all it was, companies could save a lot of money by handing out tools and not creating the CDO position. The CDO's job is to extract maximum value from data. That can be done in many ways, including customer-facing portals, large-scale analytical apps, data feeds that stem from unified views of business entities, embedded BI inside other enterprise applications, and so on. So as the CDO position picks up steam, we can expect to see larger data-focused projects where information is managed and shared across divisional and even company boundaries, leading to better data monetization, lower per-user cost of data, and higher business value per unit of data.
Organizations crack down on IoT security policies
The proliferation of DDoS attacks powered by IoT devices in 2016 will force many companies to finally make themselves accountable for discovering and monitoring the security of all proprietary IoT assets, says Matt Rodgers, head of security strategy at E8 Security. Without the proper visibility, organizations in 2017 will inevitably fail to protect themselves or their stakeholders.
Intelligence is driving the predictive cybersecurity posture
Cybercrime is big business, confirms Ettienne Reinecke, chief technology officer at Dimension Data. Over the last few years, cybercriminals have been re-investing much of the ill-gotten gains into developing more sophisticated capabilities, using more advanced technologies. Despite ongoing innovation in the cybersecurity industry, much of the effort remains reactive. Cybersecurity will become more predictive, rather than proactive.
There will be a published hack for Google Home or the Amazon Echo
When I gazed into my crystal ball located conveniently on my desk, one major event appeared in the mist: a published hack for either the Google Home or the Amazon Echo, warns Antoine Baisy, of the Threat Research Center at WhiteHat Security. The Echo has been out for two years and its been solid so far. However, with the Google Home emerging, the always-on microphones in peoples homes are a serious concern for the general consumer. Ill trust both Google and Amazon to patch the hacks before they are published, but I do think both devices have a target on them in the hacking community. If you believe crystal balls that is.
Passwords finally grow up
The recent DDoS attack that wreaked havoc on a huge portion of the internet on Oct. 21 is to blame, in part, on unchanged default passwords on IoT devices that hackers exploited, says Matt Dircks, chief executive officer at Bomgar. This security failure, in addition to ongoing use in the enterprise of inexcusably simplistic, common or old passwords, continues to make hackers jobs easy. Cybersecurity professionals will struggle to protect critical infrastructure, connected systems and remotely accessed systems and devices while weak password practices are in play. In addition, insider threats can be mitigated by better password management. The best passwords are those that users and vendors cant control. More companies will begin to use solutions that securely store passwords and regularly validate and rotate them to ensure safety and user security.
Smart Apps will explode in popularity
Widespread adoption of cognitive systems and artificial intelligence (AI) across a broad range of industries will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8.0 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020, according to 2017 predictions from IDC. A key contributor to this growth is the increasing popularity of chatbots, says Christian Gonzalez, CEO and co-founder of Wovenware. These customer-facing, intelligent bots are providing a new level of communication as people continue to spend more time in messaging apps than on social media. These cognitive tools and bots read facial expressions, understand human emotion and learn new skills, blurring the differences between humans and computers.
CISOs will shift toward granularly identifying information
Depending on your business, digital information on average is doubling every three to nine months, notes Ankur Laroia, solutions strategy and security leader at Alfresco. The knee-jerk reaction is to protect all that stuff: contain it behind hyper secure firewalls, deploy DLP (data loss prevention/protection) technologies at the parameter and key core switches, leverage active packet inspection technologies at the parameter, lock down USB ports all good countermeasures that help partially solve for, but dont prevent the issue. In 2017 and beyond, you will see a more deliberate movement by CISOs toward first identifying what exactly it is they are securing, and assigning security levels to that content. This isnt about locking down more data to make it unusable rather, its about making the data usable with pervasive, invisible governance around it.
Organizations will step up defenses against ransomware
In 2017, organizations will take ransomware more seriously and implement ways to rapidly identify compromised content and automate its recovery, predicts Don Foster, senior director of solutions marketing and technical alliances at Commvault. Ransomware has proved to be one of the most effective ways to infiltrate an organization, and cybercriminals are increasingly becoming better at embedding viruses into innocent-looking email attachments. Organizations need to figure out how to classify, separate, and wall off their data in order to reduce the risk of data being inappropriately accessed and permanently lost. Discussions need to take place at the board level about an organization's data recovery strategy and its intersection with its security and ransomware strategy in order to keep sensitive data out of the hands of the wrong people.
Data pros hit the wall with modern BI tools
These disruptive darlings of the industry continue to be well-known and to sell product, says Jake Freivald, vice president of marketing at Information Builders. But when we go to trade shows, talk to prospects, and listen to customers, we consistently find that they're running into the same things that they used to see with Excel: untrusted data, different results from different people, and answers that open up more questions. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect them to go away -- just like I don't expect Excel to go away, and for many of the same reasons, but their current position has the feel of peak pendulum position to me. Most of these problems are related, at least in part, to a lack of governance. Sometimes they lose trust because people source their own data, and it's hard to govern data that can come from anywhere. Sometimes the analytical processes themselves are too open-ended, unpredictable, and un-reproducible. The self-service BI tooling pendulum has swung about as far toward individual business user tools as it can.
Network encryption could reach 80 percent
Currently around 50 percent to 60 percent of operator networks have gone dark, says Santiago Bouzas, product marketing strategist at Openware Mobility. Thats because OTT encryption is increasing. As a result, carriers have zero visibility into the data travelling on their networks and are unable to manage subscriber QoE. And it is about to get worse... Apple launched its App Transport Security (ATS) mandate on 1 January 2017. Google is forcing encryption on developers for sign-in pages. Online ads are also being encrypted. In fact, 80 percent of the data travelling on mobile networks will be encrypted in 2017. Unless operators take proactive steps now, be ready for more dark networks and QoE headaches.
Container technology is the new disruptor in the data center
In 2017 well see more widespread adoption of containers, but the transition to a fully containerized world will take few more years, predicts Ettienne Reinecke, chief technology officer at Dimension Data. In addition, well see increasing adoption of network function virtualization (NFV) when cloud-enabling existing networks, and for new networks to be architected with hybrid cloud in mind.
The Big Four providers cash in
Existing and new SaaS offerings will forego their own, proprietary cloud, to running on one of the big four providers (AWS, Azure, Google, IBM) in a seamless and tightly integrated way, says Kelly Looney, director of DevOps consulting, and Dan Jones, director of product management, at Skytap. This is a recognition that running your own cloud at scale is hard and not a core competency of most organizations.
The security blame game will heat up
Security threats and risks are evolving so rapidly that companies across sectors expect to be breached, warns Matt Dircks, chief executive officer at Bomgar. The IoT and integrated relationships with security solution providers mean companies may not be able to easily account for ownership or origin once a breach happens. Who is responsible for securing, maintaining and patching the various technologies? Worse yet, has a product been connected that cant even be patched? A number of IoT devices are often overlooked because they fall outside of ITs traditional purview. Companies might even be unaware the security responsibility lies with them, leading to a scenario in which a connected device ends up on a vulnerability database and is quickly exploited. In other instances, security updates might be maintained by a vendor or another third party who has access to the companys system. A company is only as secure as its least secure device or relationship. When a breach occurs, even with layers of security, the question of who owns responsibility for it and who had power to do something about it will create intense reactions and finger-pointing.
