WHAT’S HOT the analyst
THIS LAST YEAR brought both technology and market changes driven by many forces. On the physical side, the year started with the bang created by the Chelyabinsk meteor. While it shattered windows and set off car alarms, greater reverberations in information technology were caused by Edward Snowden’s revelations in the spring. They upended established views of what was secret and who was safe. Technical innovations shifted priorities, and cash reserves from an uncertain market fuelled private exits for a few companies.
The year ahead will be shaped by a set of forces that are harder to define, but might be closer to the revelations occurring in quantum physics in 2013. The confirmation of the Higgs Boson and subsequent Nobel Prize for its theoretical identification are events that mark the study of the fundamental forces of nature. The forces driving markets and technologies are just as mysterious, and, like quarks, can be strange and charming.
While we don’t have a Large Hadron Collider for IT forces, for this year’s preview, we will attempt to align them with the modern physical forces and show that, as they govern the physical world, shifts in IT are pushed by a common set of factors. We have yet to land on a grand, unifying IT theory, but we think that we’ve got enough to guide us in the year to come. These four forces are: £ Mobility – The driving need to work beyond the confines of fixed locations has created both an explosion of new device types and a need for wireless connectivity.
£ Utility – An overarching force that attracts activities like application development and cloud adoption.
£ Efficiency – The core force that has converged technologies and improved data centre operation, and drives cost controls.
£ Data gravity – The tremendous pull created by the value and volume of data is one of the more far-reaching forces. It can drive investments in security to protect and capacity to contain that precious commodity.
The combination and interaction of these forces will shape IT decision-making, as well as vendor product and service plans. With this in mind, we present a few of the ideas that we see emerging from the dark matter of the universe in 2014. They are many and varied, and we’ve had to break them into three parts to cover them all. Here’s our first set, covering mobility, storage, security and networking.
The death of ‘bring your own device’
As Pluto has fallen from the ranks of planets, so will BYOD drop as a primary focus for IT. It won’t go away, and few will mourn its passing, but it turns out that there are many projects of equal magnitude, and the concern about OPMD (other people’s mobile devices) is fading. Mobility’s force has been straining IT project plans and budgets for some time, and there has been active debate about the role of BYOD activities in the enterprise. In 2014 the BYOD debate will become a moot point, as organisations that have struggled with device management move on to thinking more clearly about managing the data that’s destined for them.
We’ve already seen a shift in emphasis from mobile device management (MDM) products to mobile application management (MAM) tools. Mobility has provided the energy to start this, with utility forces in the form of user demand causing it to gain speed. Users have been reluctant to give over complete device control to their employers, and have become ever more skilled at gaining access to the data needed to get their jobs done, wherever they may be.
As the shift to mobile-based access is happening with users, enterprises will be placing a greater emphasis on applications that will protect data while getting to users. Data gravity has kept application development close to the sources of key data, often frustrating mobile users with poor performance or access. While few enterprises will be able to apply a mobile- first application development approach, the availability of better tools and platforms will allow data to be brought closer to users through replication, advances in CDNs and more stateless application design. It’s a matter of working around the access issues, rather than fully defying data gravity, but platform vendors will take up this complex task to allow users to get the performance they need.
An emphasis on mobile applications from within the enterprise will be matched by the rising wave of applications available directly to end users. Utility pressures will push users to try out all of the possible options. It is the users who know best what they need to get work done, and patience is not a virtue here. After all, in the age of ‘on demand,’ most users can’t wait for traditional enterprise development cycles. Corporate app store use will expand in an attempt to corral the growth of the number of applications in use, but the greater threat is the load that these many and varied mobile apps place
on already strained enterprise application infrastructures. Enterprises will have to address this growth to avoid being overrun with servers pinged to death from chatty mobile apps.
And there is more mobile-driven disruption with which organisations will have to deal. Wearable computing will take its first tentative steps in 2014. Enterprises will have to address all of the issues of privacy, courtesy and data access that they should have when mobile devices first walked through the corporate lobby. ‘Wearables’ will make this seem more surreptitious, but it’s not a big step from the existing recording and storage capabilities. Utility forces will again be at play, with users clamouring for simpler technology use, and governance of technology’s impacts will bring legal and human resources into deep interaction with IT. Technology teams will have to think ahead to manage this new concern, since knee-jerk bans of whole device classes have never worked in the past.
Storage remains ‘boring’ While there are many transformations being worked in storage, the pull of data gravity is keeping the rotation of the various players in a steady orbit, preventing any revolutionary transformations. There is simply too much valuable data in existing storage environments to allow a wholesale migration. There have been bright comets of new technology, pulled in by data’s great mass, but few are willing to step into riskier technologies in what remains a risk-averse sector, and the probability of a ‘Deep Impact’- style technology asteroid upsetting this balance is low. The coming year will see ever deeper penetration of solid-state storage, and although we believe 2014 will be a ‘make or break’ year for many of the all-flash array (AFA) startups and specialists, a wholesale transition to all-flash systems won’t happen, outside of a few niche applications. Storage costs for rotating media will maintain them as an efficient path to the capacity the data growth demands. Efficiency will continue to press the adoption of more intelligence within storage, especially as we expect another year of minimal growth in storage budgets. Use of automated tiering and intelligent archiving will continue to grow, as will interest in object-based storage, although overall adoption will remain confined to niche applications and use cases.
What has been a nascent convergence movement will gain strength. Converged platforms will continue to gain adherents on a quest for greater operational simplicity. Backup will continue a slow but
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