Gartner’s IT experts are at it again. They have identified the top 10 technology trends that will have a significant impact on organisations over the next three years.
There are three common themes across these top 10 trends: the merging of real and virtual worlds, the advent of intelligence everywhere and the overall technological impact of the shift towards digital business.
David Cearley, Gartner analyst, suggests that organisations must include these trends in their strategic IT planning. “This does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the trends at the same rate,” he says, “but companies should look to make deliberate decisions about them during the next two years."
The top 10 strategic technology trends are:
1. Computing everywhere
Gartner predicts that organisations will shift their focus from traditional mobile devices alone to instead focus on serving the needs of the mobile user in “diverse contexts and environments.” There will be intelligent screens on all sorts of devices and all devices will be connected to each other in many different ways.
You only have to look at the phones, wearable devices and consumer electronics - like internet-ready refrigerators and security systems - that we are using today to imagine what the next few years will bring. Because of this, Cearley warns that IT departments will lose control of the user endpoint devices, as it will simply be too difficult to manage the number of connected devices.
2. The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things will continue to expand, with Gartner predicting that more technology will be deeply embedded into everything an organisation does.
The internet will continue to link millions of assets - including devices, people and places -- at a rapidly increasing rate to deliver and share information, enhance business value and create competitive advantages.
3. 3D printing
Gartner predicts that worldwide shipments of 3D printers will grow 100% by 2016. Over the next three years, 3D printing is expected to become more cost effective as organisations begin to adopt the technology. 3D printing will demonstrate that it offers organisations a viable solution to reduce costs through improved designed, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.
4. Advanced, pervasive and invisible analytics
Analytics will be everywhere in the next three years. In every system and application, there will be a great deal of structured and unstructured data.
With all this data, organisations will need to find a way to best manage and filter the data to ensure they can extract the right information for analysis. In anticipation of this issue, Cearley notes that “every app now needs to be an analytic app,” and suggests that organisations will shift their thinking from ‘big data’ and start focusing on ‘big questions’ and ‘big answers.’
Essentially, the value is in the answers, not the data.
5. Context-rich systems
Embedded intelligence combined with analytics will foster the development of systems that are alert and responsive to their surroundings. Gartner suggests that context-aware security is an early application of this new capability and predicts that others will emerge.
Context-rich systems will be able to understand the context of a user request and adjust their responses to deliver tailored information.
6. Smart machines
Smart machines will make use of advanced algorithms that can link deep analytics and context to create systems that can understand their environment, learn for themselves and act autonomously. Autonomous vehicles, advanced robots and virtual personal assistants already exist and will continue to evolve rapidly. Gartner predicts “the smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT.”
7. Cloud and client computing
Cloud computing and mobile computing will converge and lead to the growth of centrally-coordinated applications that can be delivered to any device. Organisations will need to focus on synchronising content and application state across multiple devices.
Gartner predicts that applications will evolve to support simultaneous use across multiple devices. This means that there will be more applications that use multiple screens and exploit wearable and other devices to deliver a better experience. You can already see this happening with the new smart watches that sync with other mobile and electronic devices.
8. Software-defined applications and infrastructure
Organisations need to development agile programming of everything from applications to basic infrastructure and remain flexible to adapt quickly to changing IT environments. To take advantage of these new technologies, organisations will need to be able to dynamically integrate different applications and make use of rich APIs (application programming interfaces) to ensure all cloud services, devices and applications are connected.
9. Web-scale IT
Gartner notes that all organisations will have the capabilities to think, act and build applications and infrastructure just like web giants Amazon, Google and Facebook. This won’t happen immediately, but over time organisations will embrace models used by large cloud providers.
He also suggests that the first step toward the Web-scale IT future is for organisations to embrace DevOps. DevOps is a process that brings development and operations together in a coordinated way to drive rapid, continuous and incremental development of applications and services.
10. Risk-based security and self-protection
Organisations will realise that a 100% secure environment is impossible. They will begin to put more focus on applying sophisticated risk assessments and using more mitigation tools. Gartner notes that in a digital business world, security cannot be a roadblock.
Gartner predicts that applications will need to become self-protecting. No longer will IT departments rely on firewalls to protect their environments. In an increasingly complex environment, organisations will need every app to be self-aware and self-protecting.