IT Trends 2014: Your Move Creep...

Nothing says the year is coming to a close other than the traditional IT Trends article.  Today, now more than previous years, everyone has an opinion about technology and its future.  Technology, you might say has now reached Baseball status, i.e., everyone knows the game, so everyone has an opinion on how it should be played.  This is primarily due to the fact that our culture has become technology co-dependent.  Harsh?  Not really, when you think about the masses affinity to smartphones, microwaves, internet, and social networking. 

Smartphones alone, millions of people sitting diligently at their station with phone in hand feverously posting, texting, or playing with their “smart” phones.  Reality is, Smartphones have struck a nerve with the population, and it affords us communication without emotional commitment.  How about a microwave?  Would you be happy to throw your microwave out?  Yet we digress.  Anyway, per the world as a whole, we have collected what we recognize as the 2014 IT Trends you should be cognitive of.  For the sake of brevity and trying not to bore you stiff, we will keep it to the top 10.

1)     The Internet has a greater reach than television

People now rely on the Internet more than any other medium for news coverage. If you remember our earlier article, “Look up in the Sky! Feb 15, this trend first became apparent in the early 2000s, when radio was overtaken by Internet usage. The rapid shift towards web-based information then began to affect print media, with newspaper sales being heavily impacted.

By 2014, the trend has continued, with even television now having less reach when it comes to news reporting. Television and the Internet are in fact converging together as one. Social media, mobile technologies and exponential bandwidth improvements have driven much of this change.

2)    Everything you Want.. Everything you Need...

Through 2018, the growing variety of devices, computing styles, user contexts and interaction paradigms will make "everything everywhere" strategies unachievable. The unexpected consequence of bring your own device (BYOD) programs is a doubling or even tripling of the size of the mobile workforce. This is placing tremendous strain on IT and finance organizations. Enterprise policies on employee-owned hardware usage need to be thoroughly reviewed and, where necessary, updated and extended. Most companies only have policies for employees accessing their networks through devices that the enterprise owns and manages. Set policies to define clear expectations around what they can and can't do. Balance flexibility with confidentiality and privacy requirements.

3)     Cloudy with a Slight Chance of Hybrid

If you have been following our coverage of “Clouds”, see “Cloud is as Cloud Does” March 20, you would not be surprised that personalized clouds were inevitability.  Bringing together personal clouds and external private cloud services is an imperative. Enterprises should design private cloud services with a hybrid future in mind and make sure future integration/interoperability is possible. Hybrid cloud services can be composed in many ways, varying from relatively static to very dynamic. Managing this composition will often be the responsibility of something filling the role of cloud service broker (CSB), which handles aggregation, integration and customization of services. Enterprises that are expanding into hybrid cloud computing from private cloud services are taking on the CSB role.

Terms like "overdrafting" and "cloudbursting" are often used to describe what hybrid cloud computing will make possible. However, the vast majority of hybrid cloud services will initially be much less dynamic than that. Early hybrid cloud services will likely be more static, engineered compositions (such as integration between an internal private cloud and a public cloud service for certain functionality or data). More deployment compositions will emerge as CSBs evolve (for example, private infrastructure as a service [IaaS] offerings that can leverage external service providers based on policy and utilization).

4)    3D Printing, It’s not just for Guns Anymore)

On May 28, Wasabi showed how 3D printing saved an infant’s life with w stint that would grow with him.  This concept of rapid manufacturing with the ability to transfer 3D images to actual products has revolutionized the manufacturing work flow process.  In fact, the growth of 3D printers is projected to be 75 percent in the coming year, and as high as 200 percent in 2015.  Gartner even suggests, “the consumer market hype has made organizations aware of the fact 3D printing is real, viable, and a cost-effective means to reduce costs through improved designs, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.”  Although there are supply chain, design and intellectual property issues to ponder, 3D Printing will change the way we manufacture everyday items.  It will bring in new players in industries that normally were hard to compete in.  Subsequently, they may find extended uses such as mainstream candy manufacturing, or fast food creation, or even toys made to order. 

5)     Identity is the new Security

A wild exaggeration, but the fact is that identity must now stretch to fit both on-premises and SaaS applications. Managing who has access to what -- and deprovisioning employees when they leave the company -- is becoming both more essential and more complicated. Microsoft, Okta, Salesforce, and others are rolling out solutions. Without cloud identity management, enterprises can't adopt public cloud solutions safely and effectively.

6) Memory Is The New Storage

Big memory is exploding on two fronts. On the software side, every relational database vendor is adding in-memory capabilities, primarily for analytics, and dramatically reducing the time required for big processing jobs. On the hardware side, solutions from the likes of PernixData assemble a large, distributed cache using flash memory in servers, thus vastly reducing the percentage of reads and writes that must travel all the way to the SAN.

7)     Cloud Is The New Hardware

Now if you have been living under a rock, then I can see that this may surprise you, but if you have been paying attention to all the layoffs and spinoffs of the large PC manufacturers, you are not surprised by this prediction. All big industry shifts have been driven by new computing platforms, from the PC to client-server to the Internet. For servers, storage, and networking equipment to behave like one big "machine," where applications can assume massive scalability, the entire infrastructure must be virtualized and centrally controllable -- that is, software-defined. Ultimately this trend goes beyond SDN to include every system in the data center, all the way to HVAC. Advanced software control schemes pioneered by public cloud providers will continue to trickle down to the enterprise.

8)     Big Data... NEXT!

Big data analytics hold enormous promise, but in the near term, it’s a solution searching for a problem. In the long term, the potential for big data goes way beyond optimizing e-commerce to embrace all kinds of verticals, from manufacturing to transportation to the electrical grid. But those vertical areas require the industrial Internet (also known as the Internet of things) to come online, where connected sensors deliver huge quantities of telemetry to foster improvements in product design, accurate prediction of failure, and so on. GE and IBM are early leaders in this area, but we're just at the start. Years from now when the industrial Internet is in full swing, big data will be really, really big, and the thirst for big data analytics solutions will be unquenchable. Meanwhile, if any bubbles burst in 2014, big data will go first.  POP!

9)     Get in Here and Be Social

How many times have we heard that from someone earshot of us demanding that we socialize more and stop trying to hide, well not to disappoint… Businesses have traditionally relied on instrumented data, i.e., machine generated data to help drive decision making, i.e. turnstiles, sales numbers, ticket sales, etc.  With the advent of social networks, we have now behavioral parameters to contend with before making crucial business decisions.  We now can analyze sentiment, listen and learn from customer’ experiences and behaviors to tap into the social aspects of perception.  Know this; Politics will be first in line for this new feature.  Polls will be secondary, because they reveal what you are thinking, e.g., asking if you are good with abolishing the 3 strikes law, etc...  With social networks, the behavioral data can predict the most promising favorable positions on issues before tipping your hand to your opponent on what yours is. 

10)  LinkedIn the New Monster

Well if you already haven’t guessed, LinkedIn has taken the HR recruiting role over the resume behemoths, such as DICE and Monster.  No more is it just acceptable to just post a resume, now you need to have an online profile with real references, preferably on LinkedIn.  Don't take our word for it, look at the numbers...

73% of the companies have hired a candidate from social media. 

39 % of employers use social media for research of their candidates

80% of the Recruiters our use Social Media to find their candidates. 

When asked where is the best place to vet a candidate?

•        LinkedIn                                   94%
•         Facebook                                  65%
•         Twitter                                      55%
•         Company Blog                         20%
•        Google+                                    18%
•         YouTube                                  15%

So if you are serious about finding that dream job, you're going to have to socialize your profile, or get used to saying, "Would you like fries with that order?"

Source(s):

• http://phys.org/news144677133.html
• http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag-portals.html
• Http://ivn.us/social-ballot/2013/07/24/12-social-media-stats-of-2013-you-didnt-know/
• http://www.slideshare.net/HireologyBlog/social-recruiting-slide-share
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2013/11/18/ibm-these-are-the-to
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2013/11/18/ibm-these-are-the-top-7-social-trends-that-will-emerge-in-2014/
• http://blog.jobvite.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2013-Jobvite-Social-Recruiting-Survey-Results.png
• http://www.zdnet.com/2014-enterprise-trends-byod-pain-html5-apps-hybrid-cloud-sdx-7000021705/
• http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/9-trends-2014-and-beyond-230099?page=0,0
• http://www.itbusinessedgea.com/slideshows/top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2014-07.html

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 21 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.

For more information, contact Rick at (800) 399-6085 x502