Specialists discuss IT trends for the coming years

Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information are some of Gartner’s bets for the future of technology.

For Jim Grubb, Cisco’s vice president of marketing for emerging technologies and director of demonstrations, the growth of mobile and cloud technologies continues to dictate the rules of the game. For him, 2014 is a year driven by these trends and by the «Internet of All Things», which increasingly increases connections between people, processes, data and things.

The vice president of research of the American consultancy firm Gartner, David Cearley, is betting for this and the coming years on four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information, as generators of change and new opportunities, creating demand for advanced programmable infrastructures that can run on the Internet.

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The fact is that in the last five years the advancement of mobile devices, video streaming and applications has quadrupled the increase in global traffic. And it is estimated that this number will triple in the next five years. As the volume of data, applications, and devices increases, software is gaining an important role in helping networks become more open, programmable, and application-aware.

Almost 90% of connected people do so loading of photos and 62% loading of videos to share or archive them sites of the Internet. By 2017, global cloud IP traffic is expected to reach more than two-thirds of total data center traffic.

In this entire context, the great challenge of the IT area (business-internal or service provider) is to demonstrate that it is ready to add value to businesses, through the rapid and secure distribution of new services, applications and resources in an increasingly connected world.

Competitiveness will depend on building less complex, more agile and safer infrastructures. This means obtaining innovative technology services, applications and resources that improve people, processes and “things” in businesses.

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To adapt to this new landscape, leaders must extract more value from existing infrastructures by reducing complexity and increasing management costs.

Grubb highlights four main problems leaders face:

1- How to protect flexible and affordable infrastructure?

2- How can provisioning resources in an automated way help manage changes and trends in business speed and flexibility models?

3- How to connect equipment with each other and with all things?

4- How to remove people from manual management and place them in higher-level functions, such as projects and implementations of new services?

Employees and customers want a better, faster experience. As more experiences become available through applications, the infrastructure must become more open, programmable, and responsive to those applications. “Our strategy going forward is to automate network planning. This is a game changer for our company and our customers. Not having to wait for engineers to plan the network will help us bring new services to market more quickly. The network planning capability will also enable us to offer new self-service options that our customers are asking for, such as bandwidth targeting,” said Kerby Lyons, vice president of global network engineering and availability services, SunGard.

In addition to being agile, the infrastructures of the future will have to be intelligent, that is, be simple, generate value and reduce costs. In February 2013, Cisco released a study predicting that the global private sector will have $14.4 trillion in value (liquid profit) at stake over the next decade. This will be the result of connecting what was previously disconnected: P2P (people with people), M2P (machines with people) and M2M (machine with machine), through the Internet of Everything (IoE).

Companies that care about this are innovating how they develop, produce, sell and offer their products and services, as they coincide with companies in local markets that emphasize technological innovation and business processes. To get more value from the IoE, these companies need to focus on building intelligent infrastructure to grow.

Additionally, organizations must embrace the new IT model to reduce operational expenses and create high-quality user experiences when many types of traffic compete for bandwidth.

Security is also at the center of discussions. The expansion of connectivity for any device and many clouds is significantly impacting the threat landscape. There are more devices and applications connected, which brings greater risks and greater vulnerability.

Most of the meetings with malware on the web where they occur websites trusted and previously visited, according to Cisco’s 2013 Annual Security Report. An infrastructure in which network administrators can change or program security policies via software, rather than manually configuring hardware, can increase security and help minimize threats.

Sources:

http://gblogs.cisco.com/br/category/fast-it/

http://gblogs.cisco.com/br/2014/06/16/uma-infraestrutura-inovadora-para-capturar-o-valor-da-internet-de-todas-as-coisas/