Editor’s Note: With 2014 now upon us, RCR Wireless News has gathered predictions from leading industry analysts and executives on what they expect to see in the new year.
1. A new, faster Internet: Internet giants like Google and Apple are investing in making the Internet faster. A faster Web serves more content, adds and searches, which by end of the day means revenues for companies like Google, Apple and many e-retailers. Applications and the protocols need to be made more efficient to avoid a painfully (for users) slow Web. In order just to keep up with the traffic, Web sites need to improve its speed by up to 50%. HTML5 by itself is good, but the big upside comes with the use of the different binary protocols and content optimization tools. By the end of 2014, the use of optimized protocols like WebSockets, SPDY, Protobuf and content optimization will become mainstream.
2. Cloud downtime online showstopper for business: With giants like Amazon and Google experiencing Web outages, we are likely to see more setbacks during 2014. The increasing traffic volume and more complex applications will become a challenge even for the big Web sites. We will see some real and quite humiliating showstoppers in 2014 for on-line business. E-commerce companies need to start preparing for 2014 with real outside testing failover between data center and vendors, recovery time, trigger validation, data consistency and fall-back procedure.
3. Overload traffic: Content delivery network gets a new angle. Social media has brought a new level of risk to IT departments as a new type of traffic spike emerges. Now, in addition to traditional hacking, websites need to be aware of social media driven “attacks” that can change traffic levels of 100 gigabits per second or more from real users. Regardless of whether the attack is a malicious hack, or a Facebook post or an organized tweet – very few enterprise infrastructures can handle this load. Normal DDoS protection will not work. Only large CDN providers will be able to absorb the load without caving in.
4. Mobile hacking: With new and much improved services for mobile such as banking, gaming, etc., hackers have found new targets. The combination of traditional Web hacking and knowledge about apps and mobile operating systems will create a new battleground. There are no new crimes, only new venues. And with the explosive growth of mobile services, it would be naïve to think that this field will remain unobserved by the criminal hacker networks.
Sven Hammar is founder and CEO of Apica, a provider of load testing and performance monitoring for cloud and mobile applications and one of Europe’s fastest growing technology companies (Deloitte’s ”Fast 500” list). Hammar is a serial entrepreneur who has founded several successful IT companies.
