Dimension Data Announce List of 2016 IT Predictions
New Zealand, 22 December 2015 – Dimension Data, the global solutions and services provider, today released its IT predications for the next 12 months, and digital
transformation is high on the corporate agenda because it’s already reshaping the competitive landscape.
According to Ettienne Reinecke, Dimension Data’s Group Chief Technology Officer, social, mobile, cloud, analytics,
Internet of Things, and bimodal IT are all hot topics in the IT industry which divide IT functions and teams in
organisations worldwide. But, he says, where do organisations prioritise their budgets and resources.
“All of these trends and technologies serve a larger purpose, because they enable the transformation of an organisation
to become a digital enterprise. In other words, the business uses IT to respond faster to market opportunities and
threats, and prioritises the experience of the people it works with, whether they’re customers, employees, or business
partners.”
Reinecke said the digital transformation conversations that Dimension Data’s teams are having with organisations revolve
around four themes: data at the core of the transformation, hybrid cloud as mechanism for agility, workspaces for
tomorrow, and cybersecurity.
The role of data has fundamentally changed. For many years, data centre professionals would concentrate much of their
time and energy on things like storage drives and backups, and how best to perform tasks such as replication and
de-duplication. Then, the primary focus was reducing the cost of managing data. Now, that’s all changed. Today it’s all
about honing your ability to exploit data and finding ways to turn it into business value.
The next twelve months will see an increase in private cloud adoption, as savvy IT decision-makers with a ‘cloud first’
strategy move to adopt new managed private cloud offerings with consumption-based commercial models.
Much of social collaboration is enabled by consumer-focused tools. Technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
Foursquare, and many others have given rise to robust and business-oriented counterparts that offer audio, video,
file-sharing, and workflow integration. These include applications such as Cisco’s ‘team-rooming’ solution Spark,
Microsoft’s Yammer and Skype for Business, Viber, WhatsApp, Slack, and many others. These technologies encourage the
creation of communities; living, working, shopping, and interacting ‘out loud’; sharing ideas; easily finding people and
information; collaboration; and faster decision-making. These behaviours will make their way into more and more
organisations in 2016, allowing end users to work together seamlessly from different geographies, and at different times
of the day.
The slew of high-profile security breaches that took place in 2015 are set to continue in 2016. And the disturbing new
trend of ‘whaling’ will see hackers target senior executives with ransomware, demanding money or using their information
fraudulently. In addition, forensics will play a major role in the cybersecurity space in the next 12 months.
-ENDS-