Dimension Data Publishes It Predictions for 2017
The focus on digital is set to remain the key trend in the IT industry for the next 12 months
New Zealand, 5 December 2016 – Dimension Data, the global ICT solutions and services provider, today published its top IT predictions for 2017, and the focus on digital is set to remain the key trend in the industry for the next 12 months.
Dimension Data’s Chief Technology Officer, Ettienne Reinecke says digital is about building truly customer-centric
business models on IT including the network, data centre, applications, and other infrastructure - which may be
on-premises, or cloud-based. “Today, there’s no such thing as a digital strategy – just strategy in a digital world. And
while the digital age is creating a degree of uncertainty for some organisations, it’s also opening the doors to
exciting possibilities and ushering in an era of infinite potential.”
Reinecke cites ownership and access to data – and metadata – as a key theme. “In the year ahead, control and ownership
of data and metadata will emerge as a point of discussion – and indeed contention.
“That’s because data and metadata are the ‘gold dust’ that allow organisations to glean rich insights about customer
behaviour. In addition, metadata allows organisations to identify specific behavioural patterns, derive business
intelligence, and make informed business decisions,” Reinecke explains.
As a result, organisations are becoming increasingly protective of their metadata, and wary of who has access to it.
“Organisations don’t just want ownership and control of their data for compliance reasons: they want it to perform
analytics. We expect that this will trigger some interesting discussions between businesses and their cloud providers.
For example, where are the boundaries with respect to ownership, especially around metadata. We foresee this issue
resulting in a bit of ‘push and pull’ among the various parties.”
Other IT trends that Dimension Data predicts will make their mark in 2017 include:
Cybercrime is big business. Over the last few years, cybercriminals have been re-investing much of the ill-gotten gains
into developing more sophisticated capabilities, using more advanced technologies. Despite ongoing innovation in the
cybersecurity industry, much of the effort remains reactive. Cybersecurity will become more predictive, rather than
proactive.
A new generation is starting to show up at work, and they’re not millennials, or even Gen Z: they’re machines. And it
won’t be much longer before holographics, augmented reality, and virtual reality begin to move from B2C into B2B. Also,
over the next two to three years these technologies will drive a fundamental transformation of the workspace.
Internet of Things (IoT) will deliver on the promise of big data. Increasingly, big data projects are going through
multiple updates in a single year – and IoT is largely the reason. That’s because IoT makes it possible to examine
specific patterns that deliver specific business outcomes, and this has to increasingly be done in real-time. This will
drive a healthier investment, and faster return in big data projects.
In 2017 we’ll see more widespread adoption of containers, but the transition to a fully containerised world will take
few more years. In addition, we’ll see increasing adoption of network function virtualisation (NFV) when cloud-enabling
existing networks, and for new networks to be architected with hybrid cloud in mind.
Visit dimensiondata.com to read more about Dimension Data’s 2017 IT predictions.
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