IT plans in 2016 set for challenge from digital transformation
Editor’s Note: With 2016 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.
CIOs and other tech leaders will have to completely revamp the way they approach IT if they want their companies to keep pace and remain competitive. The need to purge cumbersome legacy systems will be imperative in 2016 in order to embrace digital transformations, like the “Internet of Things,” artificial intelligence and what IDC calls other “third-platform technologies.”
Application owners will own IT. Devops and IT will become synonymous
CIOs will have to adopt app-centric mindset or end up losing influence. LOBs are now key influencers of IT strategy and demanding a seamless user experience for their teams and customers. “Throw-over-the-wall” provisioning of application services on traditional data center infrastructure will give way to application services (like security, load balancing and analytics) and closer to app development time. Sizeable IT investment and CIO mindshare will be applied to developer-friendly, software-driven choices, and consumption-based (as opposed to large capital equipment) platforms and services.
The enterprise will be able to achieve ‘public cloud-like’ flexibility, agility and scale in the data center
Low-cost computing infrastructure, seamless scaling of applications and easy integration into development practices have largely been confined to public cloud services like Amazon.com’s Web Services. A nexus of forces, including the maturing of OpenStack implementations, container tools/implementations (such as Mesosphere, Docker and CoreOS) and software-defined networking will lead to enterprises achieving cloud-like capabilities in-house.
The enterprise will no longer be confined to specialized hardware for data center services
Global enterprise will achieve a Web-scale IT architectural approach. Enterprises will seek (and find) hardware agnostic approaches to architect their data centers. Historically, such an approach has been confined to very large cloud companies like Google, Amazon.com or Facebook. But with the performance characteristics now available in commodity x86 servers, the rise of the development operations practices in enterprises and software-based application services, the architectural approach of the cloud giants will be available to most enterprises.
IT budgets will tighten and there will be a slow down in investing in traditional technologies
The days of overspending on traditional tools and equipment that have proven only partially effective will end. As an example, Netflix has abandoned the use of traditional anti-virus tools. For data center tools, CIOs will be compelled by lines of business to shift IT spending choices from capital budgets to operating budgets. The need for uniformity of application architectures in multi-cloud environments will influence IT purchasing decisions (since traditional hardware based technologies are not portable). IT leaders will be forced to address the problem of underutilization of capital equipment that apply only in one environment especially in businesses that utilize cloud computing.
Cyberattacks and data breaches in the cloud could go from perception to reality
The International working group on cloud resiliency monitors downtimes and security risks in the cloud. So far no major security breaches or significant availability challenges have affected the cloud. Yet, security challenges are often cited as a reason enterprises are hesitant to move their computing to the cloud. So far these security concerns have primarily been driven by perception with data center security breaches far exceeding any such events in the cloud. However, as more businesses adopt the cloud and a greater share of confidential data and apps are put in the cloud by users, security challenges (DDoS or other cyberattacks), data loss and potential outages can increase.
