Articles about 2017

The reign of the cloud has begun. Employing a strong cloud strategy has escalated from being a luxury to a must have for the enterprise. Meanwhile, as companies around the world struggle with their digital transformation efforts, Bimodal IT has become the new norm, for good or bad. I anticipate we’ll see companies look to take their cloud strategies to the next level in an effort to bridge the divide between the two modes of IT in 2017.

They’ll do that through the use of hybrid approaches including the expansion of private cloud usage and new solutions that facilitate legacy application modernization. Here’s how I see those predictions playing out this year.

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2017 will be the year in which technology transforms our everyday lives and the way we communicate with others, according to electronics giant Samsung.

Among the company's predictions is machines set to become smart coaches based on what they understand from our behaviour. As our lives continue to be tracked or quantified by technology, smart machines will coach us based on the data they collect, suggesting things like changes to our diet based on our daily energy levels.

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There's been a lot of talk about big data in the past year. But many companies are still struggling with implementing big data projects and getting useful results from their information.

In this part of our series on 2017 predictions we look at what the experts think will affect the big data landscape in the coming year.

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Continuing our series of expert predictions for the coming year, today we turn our attention to the Internet of Things which has begun to take off in a serious way in 2016.

Although the IoT may already be pretty big it's set to get much, much bigger. Figures earlier this year from Machina Research predict the number of IoT connections will grow from 6 billion in 2015 to 27 billion in 2025. So what opportunities and challenges is this going to present to businesses?

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In the sci-fi film Ex Machina, reclusive inventor Nathan Bateman foresees a bleak future, telling the movie's protagonist, Caleb, that "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa".

When we don’t understand something, we tend to fear it; which is one reason popular movies like Ex Machina and HBO’s nail-biting new series Westworld like to imagine futures in which artificial intelligence plots to destroy humanity.

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This is the time of year when industry experts like to come up with predictions for the coming 12 months. Last week we looked at some of their security forecasts, today it's the turn of the cloud to get the crystal ball gazing treatment.

So, what do experts think are going to be the cloud trends of 2017?

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The past year has been a pretty turbulent one for IT security with high profile data breaches, Apple and the FBI wrangling over encryption, persistent threats from ransomware and more.

So as industry experts begin to roll out their predictions for 2017, what can we look forward to, or what do we need to beware of, in the security field?

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The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is due to come into force on May 25, 2018. This means that IT teams have more than a year to audit their IT systems, check existing customer records and data, and ensure that these systems respect the new set of rules that will be in place.

However, the gap between intentions and actions can be a big one. So what do I predict will happen around GDPR in 2017?

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If there’s one thing you can say with certainty about cyber-security in 2017, it’s that many companies are going to fail because they are simply not doing the right thing. Fundamental flaws still exist.

Until the technical people lift their heads up and see that security and business are different sides of the same coin, we will inevitably see more damaging attacks. When security people learn to speak in the language of business they will begin to understand just where in the organization they need to apply their expertise.

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The past year has been a pretty eventful one for many reasons, not least in the area of cyber security which has seen attacks gaining in sophistication and persistence.

If you were expecting 2017 to be an improvement you may be in for a disappointment according to the Information Security Forum (ISF) which is today publishing its outlook for the threats businesses will face in the next year.

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