The Future - My Predictions for 2024...

I recently turned 30, and as such, thinking about what the future may bring ensued naturally. Now, with this being a professional platform I’m posting onto, it’s probably not the right forum to begin listing out personal thoughts and plans in the context of my own life. I did, however, start to think about the future of my line of work within cybersecurity, and what could potentially lie ahead for the government space I work closely within.

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

These were the wise words of world-renowned business author, Stephen Covey.

So, what’s the ‘main thing’ in the context of technology as we press on into the latter half of 2020?

If you ask me…it’s cybersecurity.

As innovation explodes into every area of our lives, cybersecurity is providing the glue that can enable the good and disable the bad for implementing innovative technologies, as well as reducing risk from vulnerabilities.

The sudden, rapid shift of millions of workers from on-site to remote work environments is challenging organisations as never before. Enterprises are now preparing for the post-pandemic world where remote employee enablement and productivity is systematic and essential to their plans. As organisations consider how to institutionalise some of the processes and functions they quickly put into place in the early months of 2020, cybersecurity should be a prominent player in all efforts.

Among the highest priorities for organisations in 2020, however, would have to be digital transformation – surely now more than ever before. Digital transformation has been a critical constituent in safeguarding business survival since the COVID-19 debacle began gripping the world.

Over the last few years, governments across the globe have gradually and increasingly warmed to the concept of cloud services to augment their traditional infrastructure hosting arrangements on-premises. COVID-19 has not only vastly accelerated the adoption of cloud services, but in many cases has mandated the use of cloud. Governments have progressively looked to Infrastructure-as-a-Service when the risks associated with cloud were accounted for, or when racking and stacking new hardware would prove cumbersome. Government has consumed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in obscene quantities as the convenience alone has allowed organisations to quickly leverage solutions to support collaboration, productivity and respond to the demands of its workforces – with that being no more evident than at a time like now.

So, what's next? Will government withdraw into the comfort and security of the tried-and-tested traditional habits, or instead see COVID-19 as the eventual cloud catalyst?

By 2024, I predict 3 themes emerging for government's use of cloud infrastructures.

Prediction #1: Hybrid cloud architecture as the default

Once the horse has bolted, allowing organisations to empower business user requirements instantly, there is no going back to old ways where months, and even years, would go by in anticipation of critical IT infrastructural projects being delivered. To meet the fluctuating expectations and demands from service delivery teams, policy writers, etc, IT departments will need to find a way to offer the click-ready services whilst also meeting availability requirements, security and budget pressures. Government may struggle to go 100% public cloud for several reasons:

1. IT budgets are often capital-expenditure intensive. Cloud is normally paid on a consumption or operational-expenditure basis. Cloud is a service, an expense, and does not comply with accounting rules to be classified as a capital asset. Imagine trying to claim depreciation on your monthly internet usage at tax time…
2. Data Sovereignty. The sensitive information of Australians should only be hosted on Australian-based servers. Now, although most of the major cloud infrastructure providers offer Australian PoPs, it may not be so simple or affordable for many other cloud providers of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS innovations considered by government agencies.   
3. Risk. Risk. Risk. Should the government trust a private company to maintain 100% of its data? Would a service credit be enough for government to accept a loss of a critical archive? What if the cloud provider was severely compromised by a sophisticated cyberattack, resulting in millions of citizens’ data being exposed or stolen?

Government will likely strain in meeting the increased demand and expectations with a traditional IT environment and will struggle to have every workload in the cloud. This leads me to predict that hybrid cloud architectures will become the default. A hybrid cloud architecture bridges services between cloud infrastructures and government datacentres. An example of this would be for tax time or elections, where hybrid cloud architectures could quickly ramp up or down services to meet the higher seasonal demands, with the more consistent and/or sensitive workloads remaining within a government datacentre.

Prediction #2: Platform standardisation

Imagine trying to bake a cake at home and then trying to replicate that cake at your neighbour's house without the same oven or ingredients. Now translate flour, eggs and milk to infrastructure, software and management practices. Building seamless citizen services on-premise and within public cloud infrastructure takes careful consideration.

To manage a secure, hybrid cloud environment, IT departments will standardise on platforms for data analytics, security, integration, ITSM, and application life cycle management to run in any government datacentre or public cloud. Working with uniform building blocks will allow government employees and contractors to build robust services for citizens and focus on service delivery rather than reinventing the wheel.

Governments have been standardising and consolidating workloads for years on platforms such as VMware, Oracle or SAP to reduce complexity. With the emergence of hyper-focused companies like Salesforce (customer experience management), Atlassian (agile productivity enhancement), and Red Hat (making open-source secure and cost effective), a new era of consolidation will be required to keep up with security, employee skills and budgets.

Prediction #3: Containers will become the default choice, leading to government becoming more cloud native

Some say that containers today are where virtualisation was in the early 2000s, and where cloud was back around circa-2010. Just as virtualisation and cloud capabilities have replaced physical servers and on-premise datacentres, container usage will become just as rational.

Cynics said that the cloud wouldn’t ever be secure, wasn’t scalable or couldn’t provide high performance. But tech-savvy adopters built tools and processes to make the new technology work for them. Providers invested heavily in security, built massive datacentres and provided hardware bigger than many organisations ever bought for their on-site datacentres.

For an entity such as government, however, when considering the speed to deploy new applications, the ease of upgrading one piece of an application without redesigning/replacing the whole application, and the lower costs/risks associated with multiple computing environments, it’s hard to see why containers wouldn’t provide enormous advantages. These benefits are particularly important to government agencies because laws and policies tend to change one facet at a time, while government’s technology has tended to be much less flexible/more monolithic.

For containers, it’s less a question of 'if', but rather a question of 'how quickly' organisations will make containers the default choice for developing and deploying apps.

Thoughts?

What have I missed? What are your predictions?

Rodman Ramezanian - Federal Government Sales Engineer @ McAfee (CISSP, CCSP, CDPSE) [email protected]

**The views and commentary contained herein strictly belong to myself only, and do not necessarily represent McAfee’s positions, strategies or opinions**