FREMONT, CA: The last few decades have seen great stride in information technology (IT). The development in IT has changed the way business is getting conducted. With every passing year, the IT sector is evolving, opening the gateway for more innovation and efficiency. Sharpening their focus on Big Data analytics to glean business insights, improve operational efficiencies and better customer understanding, the year 2016 seems to witness the drift towards more specific decisions guided by relevant data in critical contexts, says Dan Hushon, CSC'S Chief Technology Officer.
According to Hushon, the top IT trends in 2016 will be:
Contextualized Analytics will be a prevailing force
As the world becomes more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, the volume of information that is generated is growing at an exponential rate. The conversation surrounding this information explosion and about Big Data has centered on the size and management of this data. However, there is also an opportunity to improve critical business insight by taking advantage of the context that is created from Big Data.
By using context analytics with Big Data, organizations can derive trends, patterns, and relationships from unstructured data and related structured data. Context is a cumulative history that is derived from data observations about entities and is a critical component of analytic decision process. Without context, business conclusions might be flawed. With each new data, there is the possibility of a new discovery which might be a additional knowledge about the entity. Data points such as device, location, language, social network or influencers help enterprises develop improved insights, personalize products or services and even suggest specific actions. Use of context will allow enterprises to create a more integrated and valuable information experience for clients, employees, partners and citizens.
For instance, telematic data gathered from vehicles will help automakers improve the durability of components and identify potential problems, notifying drivers before trouble occurs. Insurers will be better able to manage risks and offer drivers more personalized, usage-based policies.
Need for Strengthening Security Rises
With the onset of more contextually rich data, the growing risk of attack will increase, creating the need for next-generation techniques for network defense, identity access management, risk management and now information management. As Public clouds will play a role in the integration of contextual data, it needs to be included in security system architectures. Context-rich environments will force enterprises to give significant thought to acceptable risk levels and controls as they share a growing range of information.
Inspite of carrying security threats, the context-rich environment can be leveraged to provide a much higher degree of situational awareness. With more information about users and uses, real-time alerts and network analytics, organizations will be able to maintain a more comprehensive and consistent security posture and an increased ability to automatically detect suspicious activity.
Increasing Shift towards Leveraging API
Enterprises are investing in APIs in order to forge ahead with digital transformation initiatives, in order to increase revenue, and improve productivity. APIs have become the technology of choice for enterprises that want to make their data and content more readily available for consumption, whether it externally or internally.
As enterprises have discovered the power of APIs, they will continue to build on them. APIs enable information access and exchange between systems, allowing organizations to combine data from legacy applications and new applications. APIs create new channels for service integration, information coordination, ecosystems of information sharing and economies around information derivatives. The move toward APIs is an indicator of blooming in-house IT mentality which is ready to embraces outside infrastructure, cloud computing, as-a-service options, the freelance economy and the participation ecosystem. It features an IT-centric set of initiatives designed to make the enterprise more open, agile and prepared to participate in the vast digital economy.
CIOs to Promote Business Relationship Management
The paradigm of IT has transformed a lot from being a supporter of business to reach to the core of business. As a result of the new wave of transformation, CIO's role will continue to change, taking on the task of partnering with the business to drive information and technology value. The new partnerships will fall under the department of business relationship management (BRM) which will help the enterprise gain access to the right information and technology to make better decisions and introduce competitive products, quickly and at scale.
Rise of Converged Infrastructure
One upcoming trend is convergence and consolidation of enterprise infrastructure players. Moving towards public cloud, converged infrastructure provides ground for greater specialization in future products and services to create IT leverage in specific workload styles in specific industries. For instance, financial services platforms will combine to create core banking as a service, next-generation telematic platforms will emerge to collect and manage data from connected cars, and mobile and social platforms will converge.
IT organizations use converged infrastructure to centralize the management of IT resources, to consolidate systems, to increase resource-utilization rates, and to lower costs. It fosters such objectives by implementing pools of computers, storage and networking resources that can be shared by multiple applications and managed in a collective manner using policy-driven processes.
Converged infrastructure can serve as an enabling platform for private and public cloud computing services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.
