2018 is coming to a close, and has been a year of continued growth in enterprise computing, with GDPR legistlation causing many to scramble for compliance, security and pricvacy scandles, development of 5G networking, and growth of connected devices and IoT.
We have reached out to a few big players in the industry to get some insights as to potential developments for 2019, lets see what they had to say:
Big Data
Scott Parker, director of product marketing, Sinequa
“As big data continues to proliferate, there will be an increasing need in 2019 for technology that enables personal and contextual access. While technology continues to drive the creation of big data next year and beyond, new innovations will increasingly help people and organizations leverage big data to enable users to make better informed decisions. An area to keep an eye on next year is also the increasing focus on privacy around big data. GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act were just the beginning, and I expect to see more privacy regulation discussions next year.” – Scott Parker, director of product marketing, Sinequa
Neil Barton, CTO, WhereScape
“Business leaders often talk of the ‘time to value’ of investment in new projects. One of the trends we’ve seen through 2018 is how this has spilled over into how organizations are approaching how they leverage data. 2018 was the year that this spotlight was on automation and its associated efficiency benefits for IT teams.
Further eliminating the manual, repetitive elements within the development process will be even more of a priority in 2019. As the speed of business continues to increase, organizations must shorten the time it takes to unlock the value of data. Automation does just that, and additionally enables companies to redeploy valuable developer resources away from routine data infrastructure management processes and onto value-add tasks, such as delivering new solutions and services that will better guide the business,” said Neil Barton, CTO at WhereScape.
Gary Watson – CTO of StorCentric and Founder of Nexsan
“This year we have seen people gravitate towards high capacity storage, which is being fueled by the growing volume and complexity of data. 2018 was full of the challenges that having a massive media library comes with, but with the upcoming implementation of high density and scalable storage in 2019, these challenges will be significantly reduced. One of the main struggles we have seen is the difficulty of storing data in different locations, but with automation tools improving and becoming more accessible, users will be able to make decisions about where their data is stored and for how long. In 2019, we are most likely to see organizations taking advantage of this in a hybrid cloud model, creating the perfect IT balance.”
Security/privacy:
Stephen Gailey, solutions architect, Exabeam
“Making predictions about the immediate future of information security is pretty easy. You just need to say that attacks will become more frequent and that the impact will increase, and you are pretty assured of being 100 percent accurate. Beyond that, however, it can be somewhat tricky with new technologies, new vulnerabilities and new threats constantly emerging. 2019 promises to be as difficult to predict as every other year but one thing does seem interestingly plausible.
My prediction for next year is a real stretch: 2019 will be the year we see the first sign of government control over large Internet service companies. Organizations such as Google and Facebook still don’t seem to understand what privacy means. And it seems likely that some pretty big fines will be handed out, but I think we will actually see some form of legislative control being put forward or even break-ups considered. At the very least, I predict that at least one prominent CEO will have to step aside some time in the next year. Controversial I know, and I may be a year too early with this prediction but let’s see.” – Stephen Gailey, solutions architect, Exabeam
Setu Kulkarni, vice president of corporate strategy, WhiteHat Security
“Social contracts as we know them will change as trust and privacy between digital and physical entities will become keys to societal success: Trust and privacy are the cornerstones of security. Security does not necessarily imply obscurity and withholding – a society just won’t work in such a world. For society to work, physical entities need to trust each other and ensure privacy. You can’t go to a doctor and not tell the doctor about what is bothering you because you fear the doctor will not respect your privacy. You trust the doctor. Now phase shift to today, where a doctor is using a digital assistant to capture notes, and you are using web and mobile interfaces to interact with the doctor. Now there are digital representations of physical entities in play (digital assistants, web and mobile apps) that need to afford the same (if not higher) levels of trust and privacy to you and the doctor. Systems will need to change soon to accommodate this status change of digital entities. Digital entities will become at-par with physical entities, and as such, the social contracts as we know them will need to change to ensure the trust and privacy boundaries across humans, systems and data are upheld.” – Setu Kulkarni, vice president of corporate strategy, WhiteHat Security
Disaster Recovery/Backup:
Matt VanderZwaag, director of product development, US Signal
“In the last year, 70 percent of businesses experienced at least one IT outage in the last 12 months. These incidents were most frequently caused by natural disasters, errors while implementing new technology, ransomware and IT overloads, respectively. To decrease the risk of outages and disruptions, and to improve recovery time when they do occur, we believe that we will see more businesses trying to achieve full IT resilience, through a combination of disaster recovery planning and technology, backup in the cloud and continuous data protection.
Companies need to recruit the right IT talent either in-house or through external consultants and invest in the best IT solutions to stay ahead of the game – whether that’s planning for natural disasters or fighting off the latest malware or virus. If they fail to do so, businesses risk being hit by the high costs associated with unplanned IT downtime.” – Matt VanderZwaag, director of product development, US Signal
Networking/5G:
Lindsay Notwell, senior vice president of 5G strategy and global carrier operation, Cradlepoint
“In 2018, we saw major wireless carriers in the U.S. and around the world announce and launch commercial 5G services. In the U.S., Verizon launched their 5G Ultra Wideband residential offering in four initial markets while AT&T has announced that they will be rolling-out mobile 5G by end of year. However, there’s an underlying framework below the radar of these headline-grabbing 5G announcements that will impact more people in a big way. As a prelude to 5G, just about every major carrier is busy upgrading their current LTE infrastructure to prepare for the more widespread rollout of 5G and – in the process – are providing gigabit-class LTE services. With more urban 5G services deploying in 2019 and gigabit-class LTE available on a nationwide level, I’m predicting that 2019 will be a breakout year when enterprise and public sector customers will start to ‘Cut the Cord’ and migrate their WANs to wireless 4G LTE connections that deliver game-changing levels of performance and integrate seamlessly with 5G when and where it’s available.” – Lindsay Notwell, senior vice president of 5G strategy and global carrier operations, Cradlepoint
2019 Predictions continued here
