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Current Filter: >>>>>> The future and you Editorial Type: Feature Date: 03-2014 Views: 2981 Key Topics: Networking Security infrastructure Data Management Mobile Devices Mobile Networks Key Companies: Invoke Capital Cisco Tufin Key Products: Key Industries: Government Health | |||
| 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 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 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 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 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
All change
Loads of choice
The software revolution
Stand back from the network 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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