Modern IT trends
Nowadays, IT is developing day by day. Personally, I’m amazed at the technology we have available to us. It’s astounding to have the power to retrieve almost any information and communicate in a thousand different ways using a device that fits in your pocket. There’s always something new on the horizon, and we can’t help but wait and wonder what technological marvels are coming next. Technology upgrades can be delayed due to budget and time constraintsYet that might have to change as some of the biggest advances in the history of technology make their way into the front lines of service delivery. The IT trends complements are wood flooring, technology, paint, kitchen, furnishing, fashion, food trends etc. Here's an exploration of the top ten IT trends in the next half decade, including some of the latest industry data, and what the major opportunities and challenges are.
TREND 1: SOCIAL MEDIA - SOCIAL BUSINESS AND ENTERPRISE 2.0
While mobile phones technically have a broader reach than any communications device, social media has already surpassed that workhorse of the modern enterprise, e-mail. Increasingly, the world is using social networks and other social media-based services to stay in touch, communicate, and collaborate. Now key aspects of the CRM process are being overhauled to reflect a fundamentally social world and expecting to see stellar growth in the next year. As Salesforce's Marc Benioff was very clear in his dramatic keynote at Dreamforce last month, leading organizations are becoming social enterprises.
TREND 2 : CLOUD COMPUTING
Of all the technology trends on this list, cloud computing is one of the more interesting and in my opinion, now least controversial. While there are far more reasons to adopt cloud technologies than just cost reduction, according to Mike Vizard perceptions of performance issues and lack of visibility into the stack remain one of the top issues for large enterprises. Yet, among the large enterprise CTO and CIOs I speak with, cloud computing is being adopted steadily for non-mission critical applications and some are now even beginning to downsize their data centers. Business agility, vendor choice, and access to next-generation architectures are all benefits of employing the latest cloud computing architectures, which are often radically advanced compared to their traditional enterprise brethren.
TREND 3 : SMART PHONES
Smartphone buyers have a lot to look forward to in 2017. Devices will be thinner, faster, and perhaps a bit more intelligent than you’d like.
Virtual reality will spread to budget smartphones, and they will also have better graphics, higher resolution screens, and more storage. More than ever, you’ll be using your smartphone to pay for products and log into websites.
Deep learning could help smartphones get a fix on user behavior and improve the mobile experience. We could see a renaissance in smartphone designs, and wireless audio could replace headphone jacks in more handsets. USB-C will replace older connector and charging cables.
TREND 4 : AMAZON ECHO
The Amazon Echo is technically a Bluetooth speaker, but you wouldn’t buy one just to play music. Instead, it best serves as a Siri or Google Now for your home, a digital assistant that can tell you the weather, crawl the Web for random info, fire up some music, set alarms or calendar events, adjust a growing number of other smart home devices, and more, all upon your request.
Amazon’s done a stellar job of updating and improving the Echo since it launched late last year, and the whole thing is simple to use and operate. Like most of the devices on the list, it’s also something to gawk at. It might bring us closer to a Her-style existence, but as a friendly, hands-free bridge to the Internet, the Echo is nice to have around.
TREND 5 : ROBOTIC SURGERY
Robotic surgery, computer-assisted surgery, and robotically-assisted surgery are terms for technological developments that use robotic systems to aid in surgical procedures. Robotically-assisted surgery was developed to overcome the limitations of pre-existing minimally-invasive surgical procedures and to enhance the capabilities of surgeons performing open surgery.
In the case of enhanced open surgery, autonomous instruments (in familiar configurations) replace traditional steel tools, performing certain actions (such as rib spreading) with much smoother, feedback-controlled motions than could be achieved by a human hand. The main object of such smart instruments is to reduce or eliminate the tissue trauma traditionally associated with open surgery without requiring more than a few minutes' training on the part of surgeons. This approach seeks to improve open surgeries, particularly cardio-thoracic, that have so far not benefited from minimally-invasive techniques.
TREND 6 : RENEWED FOCUS ON OWNERSHIP AND ACCESS TO DATA AND META DATA
Control and ownership of data and metadata will emerge as a point of discussion and contention in the year ahead. That’s because data and metadata are the ‘gold dust’ that allow businesses to gain rich insights about customer behaviour, and thereby differentiate themselves in the market.
Truly digital businesses are ones that have their customers firmly in their sights. Think of the businesses that we admire for being digitally-proficient: Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. What differentiates them is their obsession with customer service and insights. Their entire business models are focused on tracking consumers as they move through the world.
So disruptors aren’t the ones that own the technology … they’re the ones that own the customer
TREND 7 : AUTOMATION AND DEVOPS BECOMES A BUSINESS CONCERN
Earlier we defined ‘digital’ as a business model that’s built on IT. This means that automation and DevOps are no longer just relevant to application developers in the IT department – they need to be embraced at every level within the organisation.
Over the last year, there’s been a great deal of interest in new DevOps companies such as Puppet, Chef, and Terraform. With good reason. But, these new players’ technologies shouldn’t be dismissed as something of interest just to developers; we believe automation has to be at the very foundation of all IT systems and processes. We believe that if automation and DevOps become part of your business’s mindset and culture, they’ll become a source of competitive advantage.
TREND 8 : CENTRALISED TRANSACTIONAL MODELS ARE COMING UNDER ATTACK
In most industries, central ‘authorities’ exercise control over the community of participants and as a result, claim that they have a reason to charge a premium for processing transactions.
These centralised transaction models are beginning to be disrupted by peer-to-peer platforms like Blockchain, which support micro transactions that are virtually free of charge and can be performed in real time and at scale.
In the last few months we’ve seen Blockchain technology extending beyond the financial services community into the world of consumer goods and other sectors. It’s even being used to eliminate counterfeiting
TREND 9 : HYBRID IT HAS COME OF AGE
Today, the world of IT is truly hybrid. There’s no such thing as a greenfield environment, unless you’re a very small start-up. This means you need to manage a blend of on-premise and cloud-based assets ─ and your cloud assets typically won’t be delivered by a single provider.
We believe this will have implications on the skills sets that businesses require. In the world of hybrid IT you need to be able to treat your on-premise assets like software, and be skilled in managing cloud-based infrastructure and software. The focus will move from ‘units of build’ to entire workloads that are underpinned by a complete reference architecture that has been tested and validated and has clear scaling metrics. These workload reference architectures are characterised by the level of automation at the provisioning, transition, and operational cycles. The way you design and operate systems in a hybrid IT environment is vastly different – as is the breadth of skills required.
TREND 10 : 3D BIOPRINTING
3D bioprinting is the process of creating cell patterns in a confined space using 3D printing technologies, where cell function and viability are preserved within the printed construct. Generally, 3D bioprinting utilizes the layer-by-layer method to deposit materials known as Bioinks create tissue-like structures that are later used in medical and tissue engineering fieldsBioprinting covers a broad range of materials. Currently, bioprinting can be used to print tissues and organs to help research drugs and pills. In addition, 3D bioprinting has begun to incorporate the printing of scaffolds. These scaffolds can be used to regenerate joints and ligaments. The first patent related to this technology was filed in the United States in 2003 and granted in 2006
Conclusion, Anyone in the tech industry knows that making predictions about the course of technology’s future, even a year out, is an exercise in futility. Surprises can come from a number of different directions, and announced developments rarely release as they’re intended. Still, it pays to forecast what’s coming next so you can prepare your marketing strategies (or your budget) accordingly. Whatever the case may be, it’s still fun to think about everything that’s coming next.
