3) Cloud Security: Security spending is up again. In 2015, mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, venture capital and private equity funding will continue at or near record levels.
According to 451 Research, this is good news for the industry, but the underlying causes are not something to cheer about. Security is in large part reactive: new tools emerge as new IT architectures evolve.
The growth in IT and mobility means that security will follow suit, roughly two years behind. Not only are new products coming along to match IT developments and widespread vulnerabilities, but they’re also all claiming to be complementary to the existing security. This will cause enterprises to pile on more layers in the coming year.
4) Closets: Demand for data and processing continues exponentially. But as the debate about Net Neutrality demonstrates, there are many technical and commercial constraints involved in accessing or delivering data over wide-area and public networks.
Part of the solution may lie with the micro-modular data centre – the next generation of server closet.
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These small data centres bring processing and storage near the point of use and are delivered as complete, self-contained products.
Micromodular data centres include IT capability (processing, storage and connectivity) coupled with the supporting infrastructure such as uninterruptible power, cooling, fire suppression, security, a complete management system and a hardened shell.
They can currently support up to 50kW of IT load and can be configured to support specialist local loads for DevOps, Internet of Things connectivity or HPC.
451 Research expects micromodular data centres to emerge as an important execution venue and an outer “edge” tier in the data centre hierarchy.
5) Crowd Workers: The structure of the workforce and the way people work is changing at a faster pace than companies’ abilities to effectively manage that change.
Human resources systems that were conceived in the 1990s are showing their age because they were not designed to deal with the multiplicity of working structures that are emerging.
In 2015, 451 Research anticipates this disconnect will increase as workers become disassociated with the firms that employ them, whether this be through increased mobility, remote working practices or the use of outsourced, freelance or crowd workers.
This is impacting processes such as on-boarding and off-boarding, corporate communications, and time and task tracking.
6) Coexistence: The data management landscape is changing. Gone are the days when IT ruled data, metering it out to data scientists and analysts for reporting and analysis projects.
The rise of self-service data-preparation tools from a crop of startups is putting data management directly into the hands of analysts.
As 2015 progresses, the number of DIY offerings for importing, cleansing, mapping, combining and transforming datasets will grow.
Analysts will adopt them – as will data-savvy marketers and sales personnel – building on their familiarity with the self-service discovery and visual-analysis tools, which first untethered them from dependence on the IT department for data.
In summary, 451 Research believes that self-service data preparation and harmonisation will complement and coexist with IT’s traditional data management tools, which will continue to address critical issues around data security, compliance and governance.