Though it is becoming harder to predict what is going to happen in the years to come, businesses are looking to take calculated gambles and SolarWinds has come up with its Top 5 predictions for 2017 to make sure the dice they roll will help them hit the IT jackpot:
1 Generalist are the new experts
As traditional, siloed IT roles—network administrators, storage administrators, systems administrators, database administrators, and more—continue to take on new responsibilities, such as working with cloud service providers in hybrid environments, implementing new technologies, like containers and microservices, and acting as an IT liaison to business leaders, 2017 signals the return of the age of education and certification.
According to SolarWind’s IT is Everywhere surveys, the realm of IT is expanding beyond the traditional borders of company-owned devices and on-premises technology, thereby placing greater demand on IT professionals to manage technology outside their traditional scope of control. 62% of IT professionals in Singapore say the expectation to support end users’ personally-owned devices connected to corporate networks is significantly greater than it was 10 years ago, while 80%of end users say they expect their employers’ IT professionals to ensure the performance of these devices.
The ability to quickly learn new IT concepts and skills will be more important than being an expert in any one technology. While siloed experts who managed disparate parts of the infrastructure and application stack played a fundamental role in the traditional IT department, the modern data center is more interconnected than ever. As a result, IT generalists – who know a little bit about everything, have a holistic understanding of the application stack, and can make quick, informed decisions about new technology – will be particularly successful in 2017 and beyond.
2 FaaS and Furious
2017 will see a new development in cloud computing: Functions as a Service (FaaS). This new cloud computing category allows customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the headache of architecting and overseeing the backend infrastructure.
It will allow IT professionals to develop programs to perform specific tasks without the barriers that are currently in place. The rise of a new chapter in cloud computing signals the continuing maturity of the cloud market from its roots as infrastructure as a service, to PaaS, SaaS, FaaS, and beyond.
We predict that in 2017, more specialised services, such as FaaS, will continue to proliferate, given the targeted efficiency that leads to both a better experience and an improved pricing structure. The ability to run nearly any type of application or function, with zero infrastructure administration on the IT professional’s behalf, is tremendously appealing, and new services will likely focus on these benefits.
3 Blockchain – the new kid on the currency block
Blockchain technologies, peer-to-peer ledger technologies that began with bitcoin, have been on the minds of financial institutions for a number of years, but in 2016, the technology expanded beyond the bounds of the financial industry. At a time when companies are finding it difficult to deal with data management and security, blockchain provides a seemingly perfect solution. Supply chain use cases, for example, are now being tested and implemented to ensure the safety, security, and integrity of the information associated with these processes.
In 2016, a multitude of companies – banks in particular – began to test blockchain in lab environments, yet few are using it in practice. One of the roadblocks is agreeing on a common protocol, which has yet to take place. The other roadblock, of course, stems from a lack of proven security practices, especially for financial organisations.
We predict that in 2017, blockchain will gain steam as a buzzword and much more research will go into the technology and its functionality, although it’s unlikely there will be any effective new capabilities able to be readily implemented. However, 2018 will prove to be much more action-packed in terms of companies figuring out how to take advantage of data ledger technology to solve their data management issues.
4 Bagging your IT Pick ‘n’ Mix
There’s no doubt that hybrid IT is the reality for the majority of organisations today and in the foreseeable future. And not only that, the center of technology itself is becoming increasingly hybrid. IT professionals must start thinking about management in a hybrid context. But what does it actually look like in practice?
According to our IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution, which surveyed 100 respondents from Singapore, 92% of the IT professionals surveyed say adopting cloud technologies is important to their organisations’ long-term business success.
In 2017, IT and business leaders will decide on specific solutions as they implement hybrid IT. For example, they may choose to use Office 365â and Skypeâ for Business while hosting the identity management solution, Active Directoryâ Federated Services, on-premises. Alternatively, the cloud has proven to be the best platform for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), delivering organisations the required flexibility and elasticity to provision and de-provision virtual desktops in bulk. By migrating this workload to the cloud, an organisation is able to relieve its IT professionals of the need to manage that infrastructure directly and refocus efforts on other on-premises projects.
Over the next several years, IT departments must exercise their growing responsibility to act as a technology liaison for business management by staying informed and making smart decisions when it comes to cloud, even if the decision is to do nothing in the near future because there is no immediate need for change. The key is to build a hybrid IT roadmap that integrates cloud adoption based on a per-workload and per-application basis to achieve a more agile, available, scalable, and efficient data center.
5 Affording to lose with data breaches
Data breaches are not a new phenomenon, and the topic will again be top of mind in 2017. Over the last year we have seen many stories of data breaches. In fact, just this past month, it was announced that in 2014, Yahoo!â fell victim to the biggest data breach in history, losing nearly 500 million accounts’ worth of personal user data to attackers. This trend shows no sign of slowing down.
We predict that in 2017, there will be exponential increases in both the volume and visibility of data breaches, particularly for large corporations. IDC's findings from its recent IT services end-user survey also reveals the top themes for IT services spending in the APeJ region are namely security enhancement, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services, and IT staff retention and training.
Simultaneously, this increase in data breaches will force organisations to weigh the implications of potential data loss against the expense of hiring security experts. In many cases, businesses in 2017 will choose to take a calculated risk about what they can “afford to lose” rather than what it costs to prevent data loss entirely. This response will be especially true in the case of ransomware attacks, when it is nearly impossible to guarantee that hackers will not leak or reveal stolen data, even after receiving the “ransom” payment.
Finally, corporations and IT professionals must become hyperaware of attackers’ increased ability to take advantage of automation. The speed and ease with which an automated network breach can take place is new, and will ultimately aid in making corporate data breaches even more commonplace in 2017.