Harnessing IT Trends in 2014

As organizations increasingly design, build, and manage IT environments that have no room for error, various technology trends, such as the ones listed below, have the potential to reshape the delivery of critical IT services to organizations and end users. In their wake lies a wide range of opportunities to deliver operational efficiencies, reduce complexity, increase productivity, and garner peace of mind.

CYBER SECURITY

When we couple the ever increasing sophisticated nature of cyber attacks with the complexities of virtual infrastructures, hybrid cloud models, and the explosive growth of mobility and bring your own everything, it's safe to say cyber security is the most watched IT trend at the moment. Regardless of whether a data breach is intentional or accidental, in can damage brand reputation, lose business and may open an organization to penalties for breaching data privacy laws.

In line with the current trend towards zero-trust security models, organizations need to look to new tools and techniques to hide their sensitive data, even from inside their own organizations. This required not just protecting access to the network, it also require securing the data itself so that even if the wrong people access it, they can't read it. Data cloaking, involving sophisticated encryption techniques, that span the full data path from data center through to a mobile user, is a key strategy to protect against today's advanced threats.

Increased use of encryption will both enable and encourage more companies to use infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud solutions, where previously they might have had concerns about the safety of their data in the cloud.

Meanwhile, advanced measures to manage access to networks will also continue to evolve. For example, attribute-based access control is an emerging technology that grants access based not only on the nature of the data and the individual requesting access, but also on the location from which access is being requested, the method used to authenticate your identity (for example using a password offers a lower level of identity authentication than using a biometric fingerprint and so may restrict access to sensitive information) and whether there is anything about the access request that is outside your normal pattern such as access to information you don't normally access or at hours outside your normal work schedule.

MOBILITY

Mobility is an unstoppable trend and organizations must continue to focus on both harnessing its benefits via mobile business process suing mobile devices and applications and managing potential security and support issues via a combination of technology, education and policies. The business focus has to on enabling greater productivity, efficiency and new ways of doing business.

Mobile computing initiatives require considerable business analysis skills as well as comprehensive IT management and support processes to realize the benefits of re-inventing customer- and employee-facing business processes. As mobile applications proliferate within the enterprise, in part due to the Bring Your Own Application (BYOA) trend, organizations will require comprehensive frameworks to provide full lifecycle management of these applications from initial inspection and deployment to eventual retirement to avoid application sprawl and downstream support issues. In addition, these mobile application strategies have to be integrated into existing enterprise software development lifecycles to ensure a seamless, efficient, and unified approach to developing and managing all applications.

SOCIAL COMPUTING

Organizations are tapping into the power of social computing to enhance employee collaboration, connect better with a new generation of customers, partners and other stakeholders, and attract and retain top talent. However, social silos could appear due to the proliferation of social features within a broad number of third-party enterprise software products, such as CRM and ERP, in addition to their core collaboration and knowledge management platforms within the business enterprise.

To counter this technological silo-effect that threatens the premise of social collaboration objectives, organizations need to ensure they have enterprise-wide social computing strategies that incorporate business objectives for social enablement and, additionally, rationalize their overall technical approaches for implementation. These technical approaches provide integration among disparate social engine platforms and with appropriate enterprise applications from which more effective knowledge sharing and collaboration can speed cycle times, improve operating efficiencies and enhance employee learning.

As enterprise-class social computing technology matures, the adoption of enterprise social computing will spread and feature-rich platforms will be increasingly used for strategic advantage. Social computing is the new strategic organizational capability that extends across the entire enterprise, connecting the workforce, customers and partners, helping manage better organizational knowledge and providing human-centric collaboration capabilities to support mission-critical business processes and functions.

CLOUD COMPUTING

IT delivery models offer multiple cloud options including private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud and community cloud within enterprise IT environments. Most major organizations are grappling with increased choice, differing financial models and new levels of complexity. To reap the benefits of these models without escalating costs or losing control, organizations must identify ways to reduce this complexity and implement technologies that can help automate the management and operations of their new, transformed environments.

Organizations need to identify their strategy and implementation plans for management tools and brokering platforms to better manage their hybrid environments while integrating it with their existing process, policy, governance, and compliance frameworks.

To counteract the issue of individual business units procuring their own cloud services from various providers without the IT organization's approval, called ‘shadow IT', internal cloud teams will seek automated techniques to rapidly deploy and operate their cloud infrastructure. This includes automated tools to help assess which enterprise applications are best suited to which cloud deployment models while meeting SLAs and compliance requirements, and self-service portals for cloud provisioning as part of their private cloud implementations. In effect, these internal IT services groups will become the providers of sophisticated brokerage, procurement and enterprise systems management capabilities to the organization, enabling workloads of all types to be provisioned and managed seamlessly regardless of IT delivery model.

BIG DATA/SMART COMPUTING

Enterprises seeking to tap into the flood of data collected in real-time across their business operations to better serve customers, open new markets, and reduce costs, must transform their underlying information infrastructures as part of their overall roadmap for big data implementation.

Organizations will start to focus on highly targeted areas for big data analytics, moving beyond sales data and customer sentiment and into aspects that can directly impact and help to optimize areas such as IT service levels and mission-critical operational processes.
Intelligent analytics will be a powerful means for IT departments to better manage the growing diversity and complexity of bring-your-own-devices (BYOD) and bring-your-own-applications (BYOA).

One of the interesting things about big data initiatives is that they necessitate strategic thinking in terms of asking questions for the business and then coming up with innovative answers to these questions. For example, what data, if it was more timely, could yield operational improvements or competitive advantage? What combinations of data, previously treated distinctly, could help identify patterns which could then be rapidly acted upon to optimize business processes and adapt on-the-fly to the changing business environment?

IN CONCLUSION

As organizations make smarter investments, automate processes, and adjust IT infrastructure to better keep pace with the business, doing less with more is the norm. For businesses and governments alike, harnessing these trends is vital for future growth, innovation and securing a competitive advantage; it offers organizations the opportunity to cut costs, optimize existing assets, improve service levels and satisfy ever-stricter compliance requirements.