Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015

At its recent technology symposium, analyst firm Gartner examined what it considered to be the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015. These are trends that have the potential for significant impact on organisations in the next three years, and cover three themes: the merging of the real and virtual worlds, the advent of intelligence everywhere, and the technology impact of the digital business shift.

1. 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.

David Cearley, VP and Gartner Fellow, said, “Phones and wearable devices are now part of an expanded computing environment that includes such things as consumer electronics and connected screens in the workplace and public space.”

Increasingly, the overall environment will need to adapt to the requirements of the mobile user. This will continue to raise significant management challenges for IT organisations, as they lose control of user endpoint devices.

2. The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) – connected assets and machines – has the potential to leverage four basic usage models: Manage, Monetise, Operate and Extend, says Gartner.

But enterprises should also consider applying these models to other things. 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 make use of these four models.

3. 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 industrial use expands, and the market for relatively low-cost 3D printing devices continues to grow rapidly.

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.

4. Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics

Analytics will take centre 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 analysed.

“Every app now needs to be an analytic app,” said 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.”

5. 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.

Applications will be able to understand the context of a user request. This will enable them to adjust their security response and also adjust how information is delivered to the user. The result will be to greatly simplify an increasingly complex computing world.

6. Smart Machines

Smart Machines will emerge as deep analytics are applied to an understanding of context, says Gartner.

Add advanced algorithms, and systems will 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, says Gartner.

It adds that the smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT.

7. 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 Cearley. “While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favour apps that use the intelligence and storage of the client device effectively, coordination and management will be based in the cloud.”

In the near term, the focus for cloud/client will be on synchronising content and application state across multiple devices and addressing application portability across devices. Over time, applications will evolve to support simultaneous use of multiple devices.

8. Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure

Software-defined networking, storage, data centres and security are maturing. Cloud services are software-configurable through API calls. Applications will also 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.

What are needed are rules, models and code that can dynamically assemble and configure all of the elements needed from the network through the application.

9. 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 organisations 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-optimised and software-defined approaches reach mainstream. The first step toward the Web-scale IT future for many organisations, says Gartner, should be DevOps.

DevOps brings development and operations together in a coordinated way to drive rapid, continuous incremental development of applications and services.

10. Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection

Organisations will increasingly recognise that it’s not possible to provide a 100 percent secured environment. Once they acknowledge that, they can begin to apply more-sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation tools.

The recognition that perimeter defence is inadequate, and applications need to take a more active role in security, gives rise to a new multifaceted approach.

We will see more of the following: security-aware application design; dynamic and static application security testing; runtime application self-protection; and active, context-aware and adaptive access controls.

This will lead to new models of building security directly into applications.

How many of these trends are you already seeing in your organisation?