Enterprises have to look
at possibilities to build solutions that integrate business value
with intelligence. Gartner The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015
are:
1. Computing Everywhere
The Internet of Things
will continue to expand, propelled by the ubiquity of user-oriented
computing.
The mobile devices
continue to proliferate with an increased emphasis on serving the
needs of the mobile user in diverse contexts and environments. Phones
and wearable devices are now part of an expanded computing
environment that includes such things as consumer electronics and
connected screens in the workplace and public space. "Increasingly,
it's the overall environment that will need to adapt to the
requirements of the mobile user. This will continue to raise
significant management challenges for IT organizations as they lose
control of user endpoint devices. It will also require increased
attention to user experience design."
2. The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things
will continue to expand, propelled by the ubiquity of user-oriented
computing. The combination of data streams and services created by
digitizing everything creates four basic usage models — Manage,
Monetize, Operate and Extend. These four basic models can be applied
to any of the four "Internets." Enterprises should not
limit themselves to thinking that only the Internet of Things (IoT)
(assets and machines) has the potential to leverage these four
models. For example, the pay-per-use model can be applied to assets
(such as industrial equipment), services (such as pay-as-you-drive
insurance), people (such as movers), places (such as parking spots)
and systems (such as cloud services). Enterprises from all industries
can leverage these four models.
3. 3D Printing
Worldwide shipments of 3D
printers are expected to grow 98 percent in 2015, followed by a
doubling of unit shipments in 2016. 3D printing will reach a tipping
point over the next three years as the market for relatively low-cost
3D printing devices continues to grow rapidly and industrial use
expands significantly. New industrial, biomedical and consumer
applications will continue to demonstrate that 3D printing is a real,
viable and cost-effective means to reduce costs through improved
designs, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.
4. Advanced, Pervasive
and Invisible Analytics
Analytics will take
center stage as the volume of data generated by embedded systems
increases and vast pools of structured and unstructured data inside
and outside the enterprise are analyzed. Organizations need to manage
how best to filter the huge amounts of data coming from the IoT,
social media and wearable devices, and then deliver exactly the right
information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics will
become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere.
Big data remains an
important enabler for this trend but the focus needs to shift to
thinking about big questions and big answers first and big data
second.
5. Context-Rich Systems
Ubiquitous embedded
intelligence combined with pervasive analytics will drive the
development of systems that are alert to their surroundings and able
to respond appropriately. Context-aware security is an early
application of this new capability, but others will emerge. By
understanding the context of a user request, applications can not
only adjust their security response but also adjust how information
is delivered to the user, greatly simplifying an increasingly complex
computing world.
6. Smart Machines
Deep analytics applied to
an understanding of context provide the preconditions for a world of
smart machines. This foundation combines with advanced algorithms
that allow systems to understand their environment, learn for
themselves, and act autonomously. Prototype autonomous vehicles,
advanced robots, virtual personal assistants and smart advisors
already exist and will evolve rapidly, ushering in a new age of
machine helpers. The smart machine era will be the most disruptive in
the history of IT.
7. Cloud/Client Computing
The convergence of cloud
and mobile computing will continue to promote the growth of centrally
coordinated applications that can be delivered to any device.
Cloud is the new style of
elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal
applications and external applications will be built on this new
style. While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favor apps
that use the intelligence and storage of the client device
effectively, coordination and management will be based in the cloud.
In the near term, the
focus for cloud/client will be on synchronizing content and
application state across multiple devices and addressing application
portability across devices. Over time, applications will evolve to
support simultaneous use of multiple devices. The second-screen
phenomenon today focuses on coordinating television viewing with use
of a mobile device. In the future, games and enterprise applications
alike will use multiple screens and exploit wearables and other
devices to deliver an enhanced experience.
8. Software-Defined
Applications and Infrastructure
Agile programming of
everything from applications to basic infrastructure is essential to
enable organizations to deliver the flexibility required to make the
digital business work.
Software-defined
networking, storage, data centers and security are maturing. Cloud
services are software-configurable through API calls, and
applications, too, increasingly have rich APIs to access their
function and content programmatically. To deal with the rapidly
changing demands of digital business and scale systems up - or down -
rapidly, computing has to move away from static to dynamic models.
Rules, models and code that can dynamically assemble and configure
all of the elements needed from the network through the application
are needed.
9. Web-Scale IT
Web-scale IT is a pattern
of global-class computing that delivers the capabilities of large
cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting. More
organizations will begin thinking, acting and building applications
and infrastructure like Web giants such as Amazon, Google and
Facebook. Web-scale IT does not happen immediately, but will evolve
over time as commercial hardware platforms embrace the new models and
cloud-optimized and software-defined approaches reach mainstream. The
first step toward the Web-scale IT future for many organizations
should be DevOps — bringing development and operations together in
a coordinated way to drive rapid, continuous incremental development
of applications and services.
10. Risk-Based Security
and Self-Protection
All roads to the digital
future lead through security. However, in a digital business world,
security cannot be a roadblock that stops all progress. Organizations
will increasingly recognize that it is not possible to provide a 100
percent secured environment. Once organizations acknowledge that,
they can begin to apply more-sophisticated risk assessment and
mitigation tools. On the technical side, recognition that perimeter
defense is inadequate and applications need to take a more active
role in security gives rise to a new multifaceted approach.
Security-aware application design, dynamic and static application
security testing, and runtime application self-protection combined
with active context-aware and adaptive access controls are all needed
in today's dangerous digital world. This will lead to new models of
building security directly into applications. Perimeters and
firewalls are no longer enough; every app needs to be self-aware and
self-protecting.
