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The future and you

Editorial Type: Feature     Date: 03-2014    Views: 2981   







Ray Smyth, editor of Network Computing and Business Technology mentor considers the shape of things to come - and the challenges that may exist

The active management and development of a business aligned IT estate is not a trivial task, and it is highly multi-faceted in ways that just a few years ago would have been impossible to anticipate. There is of course no shortage of opinion - particularly at the start of a new year - about what the next big thing will be and why you should buy it, and it is here that care must be taken because the vendor landscape has radically altered.

In the early days IT solutions were so comparatively few in number and uncomprehensive (relatively speaking) in their ability that the development of the IT estate was led (actually I think limited) by what was available - and almost never by what was really needed. In stark contrast the vendor landscape is now highly diversified with a wide range of variation and overlap and not to belittle it (in fact the opposite) it is a huge, highly capable and ever versatile bucket of IT capability.

This bucket of IT capability is broad-ranging and includes solutions that everyone should have and others that are so specialised that they are highly specific. The choice, principle focus and overlap of solutions can be a major headache though, and creating an angst-ridden decision making process.

Security for all
If I were to pick one market segment that everybody must engage with at some level it would be security. It used to be that the way to get really secure was to throw money at the latest innovation and build an invincible battery of defence; or at least that was the perception. Such a naïve approach was bound to fail and it showed no appreciation for the likely threats or the appetite for the range of potential risks that might be tolerable. It most certainly overlooked what survey after survey cites as the single biggest risk, often referred to as the insider risk.

I recently met with Mike Lynch from Invoke Capital who is perhaps better known for the magnificent creation of the British technology company ultimately sold to HP, Autonomy Corporation. He explained to me that he thought the future would be mainly data driven, adding that cyber security had become an illusion. He also pointed out that the CIO is not necessarily technically qualified or experienced, adding that technical competency is essential to the role and that in his view, we need to go back to basics.

Has security become an illusion? Well it has if anyone believes that the solutions they have installed and the process created are the end game. I agree with Mike, who convincingly opines that an entirely new approach is required, and to this end I will be watching his latest investment, Dark Trace, with great interest.

Data driven
We can all understand with great ease that data creation is simply enormous and growing, but there are consequences. That data needs to be transported, stored, searched, backed-up, available, archived, legal and secured - and these and other business technology hygiene factors are not an option. In fact it is set to get worse because according to Cisco's N Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2013 to 2018, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase nearly 11-fold over the next four years and reach an annual run rate of 190 exabytes by 2018. Perhaps the last letter in the acronym BYOD actually stands for data?

The Cisco forecast makes reference to a global shift to smarter devices with smartphones, laptops and tablets driving around 94 per cent of the growth by 2018. To give this its perspective, basic mobile handsets will only account for 1 per cent of global mobile data traffic by 2018, and in this time they say that mobile cloud traffic will grow 12-fold creating a 24 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

More people with more devices you could conclude, but that is just part of the story. This data and its related service are about to be impacted by machine-to-machine (M2M) connections and Wearable Devices and that's before Dr. Who has rebooted the TARDIS. The Cisco survey predicts that by 2018 M2M connections will represent nearly 20 percent of mobile-connected devices in use and generate almost six percent of total mobile data traffic and that there will be 176.9 million global wearable devices: a 52 percent CAGR.

Already some of us use devices that can automatically route data between cell and Wi-Fi connectivity (known as Wi-Fi Offload) and these include public hotspots and residential Wi-Fi networks. The Cisco report says that more mobile data traffic will be offloaded onto Wi-Fi from mobile-connected devices (17.3 exabytes per month) than will remain on mobile networks by 2018 (15.9 exabytes per month). What are the implications of this to your business and its future?

Business Technology Specialists and the real risk
As I previously mentioned, doing what needs to be done to meet the needs of a particular business - business technology hygiene - isn't to be considered optional. There is no shortage of business leaders reinforcing this view and Matt Gladwin, network and IT infrastructure manager at Genting Casinos, points out in a businesslike way that "Not understanding the cost-benefit is the main barrier to data protection; this box [for example] is going to cost £10,000 but I don't understand what it's going to save me." He added, "It could save a £500,000 DPA fine but then how do you put a number on the cost of your reputation being damaged on top of that?"

Terence Greer-King, director of cyber security at Cisco adds "I think it is brilliant that we live in such a connected world and we are using IT more and more, but we all need to be aware of the security implications. We need to remember that it is a very, very fast-changing world in security and people are trying to make money by getting into your databases and taking your data. Attacks are happening every day. Cisco suffers 2 million a day and they no longer need to be highly-skilled either."

Stronger together - let's orchestrate
No, this is not my attempt to usurp David Bowie at the Brits! Isolated pockets of capability, functionality, defence and protection are just that: they only see what they see and as always the lack of alert or confirmed breach cannot be considered as effective security. I have always held the view that the network manager and a good network monitoring device can, if they are clever, secure for themselves advanced visibility of an attack or data breach. The problem with my theory is that it needs more than an acute mind because the network data needs to be correlated and referenced against known and emerging attack profiles in real-time. At last we are starting to see things happening that edge this towards reality. One such example centres around the vast number of polices that exist to underpin any given security stature. These polices change frequently and all too often in isolation to each other with no thought for the wider consequences.

The IT sector is very good at hijacking words and I think we are going to see an increased use of the word orchestration in the coming years. Its possibly one of the better ones of recent times for two reasons: firstly it actually does give an indication of what is going on and secondly, it is hard to reverse existing solutions into the term to give them new marketing pizzazz.

Reuven Harrison, founder and CTO at Tufin is predicting such changes, and he starts by asserting that there needs to be a more integrated approach between IT security and operations which have traditionally been managed from well-defended silos. This form of orchestrated IT will he says be, "Key to business success [and] enable organisations to deploy applications faster, more accurately and with increased security." Extending his thinking on this topic, he adds other predictions, including the emergence of the application infrastructure manager and that the management of network infrastructure will become orchestrated. Harrison concludes by saying, "We're seeing the proliferation of virtualisation and the cloud, along with emerging technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and software defined data centres and new business models that rely, more than ever on applications. This combined with recent announcements by vendors including VMWare, Palo Alto, Cisco and F5, will set the stage for several disruptive shifts in network security operations over the next year or so."

Hybrid to go
While security is a critical factor it isn't the only one. We have seen how computing architecture has evolved through the mainframe, client-server and the cloud but there has always been an implied one or the other exclusivity. Now and in the future architecture will be highly flexible, very hybrid and changing a lot. There is no need for organisations to commit to expensive and cumbersome investments in its efforts to launch a new product. What you might call pop-up computing based on virtualised, cloud based services of all kinds and available on flexible and cost effective terms will become the norm. Just because something starts life virtualised in the cloud, it doesn't need to remain there. A private cloud may give way to a public or hybrid implementation. As I have already said the bucket of IT technology is there to be used creatively and to provide business edge and advantage.

All change
There is so much more that I could say concerning how IT estates will evolve, be secured and managed but this is not the point I want to make. The role of all IT professionals has changed and will change further. The role of IT vendors and their distribution and reseller channels has changed and will change further. A new generation is leaving school, college and university and what they see will be their own brand of normal - and this they will build on and evolve. Anyone still lamenting how IT works in silos isn't even a dinosaur because the departmental silos that make up an organisation are the next frontier for decimations in favour of a single multi (very) disciplined IT focused team. The change that is needed can and will be made by the next generation of IT professionals and vendors in a context where it is natural to speak about information technology only in the context of what it can do for the business.

Loads of choice
This wonderfully exciting bucket of technology is both an opportunity and a challenge. The first step is to have a good working knowledge of the available options and then to consider whether or not they are applicable to the business model in question. The industry itself cannot always clearly define what is on offer. I recently witnessed a discussion on the merits of IT containers and Virtual machines. It was clear to me that the three enjoined CTO' could argue the case for their bias but not for the basis of deployment and suitability to a particular purpose. This means that with more options arising decision making will inevitably get harder. And for what it's worth - and I am no expert - it seems to me that the debate is really about Hypervisor Virtualisation and Container Virtualisation and that the choice will depend on objectives. We will see.

The software revolution
Many will argue that we have been going through a software revolution and at a certain level this is correct. But at the network level there has stubbornly remained an unhealthy level of proprietary software which of itself has limited choice around network infrastructure. SDN is a real revolution in my mind and its possibilities are only just beginning to crystallise. This will change the role of network administrators and offer them greater control over network functionality.

Stand back from the network
With so much to consider, it is not possible to be conclusive about the shape of the future. There can be more certainty about what is needed and this includes a different mind-set that is business aligned. Technical skills will be critical but the technical profile of the networking and IT team of tomorrow will be radically different, singularly focused and with the current skills shortages, Government will need to quickly get a handle of what training and re-skilling is actually required. Similarly business leaders will need to accept that there are no absolutes. Non production modelling and trialling will become critical to investment decisions being well made.

We are in the foothills of the 21st Century, and I think it will be seen as the point at which everything changed and became more connected both technically, in terms of process, and to the business values that fund the IT in the first place.

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