2019

Member Article

2019 – A forward look in technology

2018 has been quite a year for technology. Smart cities have become a new normal, artificial intelligence (AI) has become more mainstream, and multi-cloud has taken the world by storm. As 2018 draws to a close, twelve IT experts share their predictions for the technology landscape in 2019:

Cloud, cloud, cloud

The cloud is undoubtedly one of the most talked about topics in the tech scene. As James Henigan, Cloud and Managed Services Director at Six Degrees predicts, “Multi-cloud is one of the most pervasive trends in technology today. By piecing together the right services from the right suppliers, multi-cloud services are often likely to be the best technical solution for a company.” Jon Toor, CMO at Cloudian seconds this view, adding, “More enterprises will adopt a multi-cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and enhance their business flexibility. However, a multi-cloud approach raises new management challenges that users will need to address to ensure a positive experience.”

“2019 needs to be the year of long-term cloud planning,” believes Svenja de Vos, Chief Technology Officer, Leaseweb Global. “Companies should re-examine cloud strategy to ensure they have a custom approach that includes an exit plan. An organization needs to know how it is independent from a cloud service provider and how it can switch to a new cloud technology, should it be required.”

However, not everyone thinks that the future is multi-cloud, advocating other cloud-driven models. “Cloud-first is the new norm,” predicts Neil Barton, CTO at WhereScape. “In 2019, large enterprises will fully embrace this stance and will expend considerable resources on creating and maintaining hybrid cloud environments. Alongside this, as businesses modernise their data infrastructure, we’ll also see a move to being automation-first – making automation of data ingestion and processing a standard part of any cloud migration effort. New environments bring fresh challenges, and companies making this transition will not only be evolving how they work to best leverage the cloud, they will also be navigating working within an infrastructure where they data resides both on-premises and on different cloud environments.”

Jake Madders, Director at Hyve Managed Hosting agrees, stating, “A lot of industry talk is focused around the biggest cloud players – Google, AWS, Azure – and their next moves. But it’s important to take notice of the wider cloud and hosting industry, which offers a huge range of highly competitive and innovative solutions, particularly in key areas such as hybrid cloud technology, managed services and security. “The UK cloud industry, in particular, is a vibrant and ambitious sector,” Madders continues, “and 2019 will see more great examples of domestic and international growth. Some UK cloud businesses are taking their ambition directly to the home markets of the biggest global players by expanding to the US.”

Mat Clothier, CEO and Founder at Cloudhouse concurs, commenting, “As more and more enterprises move away from legacy systems and towards a cloud-based future, they will realise that migrating traditional apps is challenging; there is a growing need for the tools that offer portability that may not be possible otherwise. 2019 will inevitably see more enterprise workloads move to Azure, AWS and Citrix, but what remains to be seen is how many businesses will realise the importance of tools that manage the delivery of these applications across a global network of data centres.”

Building for AI

Building from a cloud foundation is just the start, though, for many organisations. The link between cloud and AI was one noted by Gregg Mearing, Head of Managed Services at Node4. He comments, “The drive towards AI will become much more of a focus for businesses next year, particularly as companies begin to realise the huge benefits in efficiency when it comes to building and deploying applications in the cloud. Take Microsoft, for example; increasingly its customers are using Azure AI to build apps that are smarter, more intuitive and responsive in order to free up people power, and we will see more of this in 2019. Businesses utilising the cloud will do well to leverage the mantra that ‘knowledge is power’, and applying predictive analytics to data that helps drive AI can mean companies can act on it and get ahead of the game. Working with a tech partner that has the technical capability to gather this data as well as provide consultancy of how it is used will be highly influential in helping organisations drive the benefit of AI in their businesses.”

According to Bob Davis, CMO at Plutora, “In software development, the big story in 2019 will be machine learning and AI. In the coming year, the quality of software will be as much about what machine learning and AI can accomplish as anything else. In the past, delivery processes have been designed to be lean and reduce or eliminate waste but to me, that’s an outdated, glass-half-empty way of viewing the process. This year, if we want to fully leverage these two technologies, we need to understand that the opposite of waste is value and take the glass-half-full view that becoming more efficient means increasing value, rather than reducing waste.”

The impact of AI is something that Stephen Gailey, Solutions Architect at Exabeam agrees with, stating, “2019 seems as if it will be the year of analytics, machine learning and AI. These tools are already available, though their take up has often been delayed by a failure to match these new capabilities with appropriate new workflows and SOC practices. Next year should see some of the pretenders – those claiming to use these techniques but actually using last generation’s correlation and alert techniques in disguise – fall away, allowing the real innovators in this field to begin to dominate. This is likely to lead to some acquisitions, as the large incumbents, who have struggled to develop this technology, seek to buy it instead. 2019 is the year to invest in machine learning security start-ups demonstrating real capabilities.”

The impact of AI will be far-reaching, as Rupert Spiegelberg, CEO at IDNow notes, “Artificial intelligence will continue to drive digitization in many industries next year. This development is facilitated by three factors: the research and development of artificial intelligence technology is offering highly sophisticated application possibilities for the collection, processing and evaluation of data; international regulatory standards are opening up business opportunities across national borders for digitally-based businesses - the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) for European finance is an example of this. And thirdly, AI-driven services are also increasingly accepted by end users. Live chat services, or the use of virtual assistants, is becoming a natural part of everyday life for more and more people, although this brings with it increased customer expectations for high quality service levels.”

Security threats pose trouble in AI-paradise

However, not all will be plain sailing in 2019, as Naaman Hart, Managed Services Security Engineer at Digital Guardian acknowledges, “Windows 7 will continue to be an issue, especially now that Microsoft is offering extended ‘security update’ support until January 2023. While companies struggle to mitigate the effects of maintaining Windows 7 for another five years, they can count on having to defend against botnets built up of the same (as happened with machines running Windows XP). Companies that delay investing in their IT environments will find themselves defending against insider and outsider attacks made viable by clinging on to vulnerability-ridden operating systems.”

Similarly, Todd Kelly, CSO at Cradlepoint notes that, “In 2019, as the network security industry develops better detection and defense solutions, traditional fixed perimeter-based approaches to network security will evolve. More people and things are living outside these walls, and the walls built around data centers and branch offices are often penetrated from within by employees using unsecure personal devices and shadow IT deployments. The new WAN landscape next year will demand an elastic edge to extend protection beyond physical and static infrastructure for people, mobile and connected devices on the move.”

Whether it’s the potential that cloud and AI present, or the challenges that the new landscape may face from a security perspective, there’s no denying that 2019 will be an eventful year for business technology.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Industry Experts .

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