Gartner defines a strategic technology trend as one with the
potential for significant impact on the organization in the next three years.
Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption
to the business, end users or IT, the need for a major investment, or the risk
of being late to adopt. These technologies impact the organization's long-term
plans, programs and initiatives.
Computing Everywhere
As mobile devices continue to proliferate, Gartner predicts
an increased emphasis on serving the needs of the mobile user in diverse
contexts and environments, as opposed to focusing on devices alone.
The Internet of
Things
The combination of data streams and services created by
digitizing everything creates four basic usage models — Manage, Monetize,
Operate and Extend. These four basic models can be applied to any of the four
"Internets." Enterprises should not limit themselves to thinking that
only the Internet of Things (IoT) (assets and machines) has the potential to leverage
these four models. For example, the pay-per-use model can be applied to assets
(such as industrial equipment), services (such as pay-as-you-drive insurance),
people (such as movers), places (such as parking spots) and systems (such as
cloud services). Enterprises from all industries can leverage these four
models.
3D Printing
Worldwide shipments of 3D printers are expected to grow 98
percent in 2015, followed by a doubling of unit shipments in 2016. 3D printing
will reach a tipping point over the next three years as the market for
relatively low-cost 3D printing devices continues to grow rapidly and
industrial use expands significantly. New industrial, biomedical and consumer
applications will continue to demonstrate that 3D printing is a real, viable
and cost-effective means to reduce costs through improved designs, streamlined
prototyping and short-run manufacturing.
Advanced, Pervasive
and Invisible Analytics
Analytics will take center stage as the volume of data
generated by embedded systems increases and vast pools of structured and
unstructured data inside and outside the enterprise are analyzed. "Every
app now needs to be an analytic app," said Mr. Cearley.
"Organizations need to manage how best to filter the huge amounts of data
coming from the IoT, social media and wearable devices, and then deliver
exactly the right information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics
will become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere." Big data remains
an important enabler for this trend but the focus needs to shift to thinking
about big questions and big answers first and big data second — the value is in
the answers, not the data.
Context-Rich Systems
Ubiquitous embedded intelligence combined with pervasive
analytics will drive the development of systems that are alert to their
surroundings and able to respond appropriately. Context-aware security is an
early application of this new capability, but others will emerge. By
understanding the context of a user request, applications can not only adjust
their security response but also adjust how information is delivered to the
user, greatly simplifying an increasingly complex computing world.
Smart Machines
Deep analytics applied to an understanding of context
provide the preconditions for a world of smart machines. This foundation
combines with advanced algorithms that allow systems to understand their
environment, learn for themselves, and act autonomously. Prototype autonomous
vehicles, advanced robots, virtual personal assistants and smart advisors
already exist and will evolve rapidly, ushering in a new age of machine
helpers. The smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of
IT.
Cloud/Client
Computing
The convergence of cloud and mobile computing will continue
to promote the growth of centrally coordinated applications that can be
delivered to any device. "Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable,
self-service computing, and both internal applications and external
applications will be built on this new style," said Mr. Cearley.
"While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favor apps that use the
intelligence and storage of the client device effectively, coordination and
management will be based in the cloud."
Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure
Agile programming of everything from applications to basic
infrastructure is essential to enable organizations to deliver the flexibility
required to make the digital business work. Software-defined networking,
storage, data centers and security are maturing. Cloud services are
software-configurable through API calls, and applications, too, increasingly
have rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically. To deal
with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and scale systems up — or
down — rapidly, computing has to move away from static to dynamic models.
Rules, models and code that can dynamically assemble and configure all of the
elements needed from the network through the application are needed.
Web-Scale IT
Web-scale
IT is a pattern of global-class computing that delivers the
capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting.
More organizations will begin thinking, acting and building applications and
infrastructure like Web giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. Web-scale
IT does not happen immediately, but will evolve over time as commercial
hardware platforms embrace the new models and cloud-optimized and software-defined
approaches reach mainstream. The first step toward the Web-scale IT future for
many organizations should be DevOps — bringing development and operations
together in a coordinated way to drive rapid, continuous incremental
development of applications and services.
Risk-Based Security
and Self-Protection
All roads to the digital future lead through security.
However, in a digital business world, security cannot be a roadblock that stops
all progress. Organizations will increasingly recognize that it is not possible
to provide a 100 percent secured environment. Once organizations acknowledge
that, they can begin to apply more-sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation
tools. On the technical side, recognition that perimeter defense is inadequate
and applications need to take a more active role in security gives rise to a
new multifaceted approach. Security-aware application design, dynamic and
static application security testing, and runtime application self-protection
combined with active context-aware and adaptive access controls are all needed
in today's dangerous digital world. This will lead to new models of building
security directly into applications. Perimeters and firewalls are no longer
enough; every app needs to be self-aware and self-protecting.
Read more at:
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