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Contributed article by Deepak Kumar, CTO and Founder of Adaptiva

Enterprises will Ignore the IoT, Windows 10 will Excite, Security Breaches will Increase

Nearly every year, enterprise IT gets a little more exciting. With new technology appearing almost daily, this could be the most astonishing year we've seen yet. New advances will bring amazing opportunities, and some watchpoints as well. Here are just a few of my predictions for enterprise IT in 2015.

Enterprises will Continue to Ignore the Internet of Things: Cisco predicts that by 2020 the IoT will grow to 50 billion connected endpoints. While nobody questions that the IoT will eventually cause a tidal wave of Internet traffic, many enterprises are not worried about it hitting the WAN in a big way this year. Enterprise IT decision makers are already stretched to meet this year's urgent business needs. With so many pressing demands for IT decision makers to satisfy, the IoT barely registers as an immediate priority. While some will begin to plan and address network capacity and other coming impacts of the IoT in 2015, most will continue to ignore it.

Windows 10 Will Generate Tremendous Excitement in the Enterprise: Enterprises are hungry for an OS they can count on for many years into the future. Microsoft has worked very hard to understand why IT did not upgrade to Windows 8/8.1 en mass. With Windows 10, Redmond is determined to give enterprises exactly what they want. Some key features of Windows 10 that will appeal to enterprise IT include a truly friendly UI, deeper security, advanced cloud and hybrid cloud integration, improved device manageability including MDM, easier operating system deployment (OSD), universal applications (write once, deploy on many types of devices), and the same low hardware requirements on desktops/laptops as Windows 7/8.

IT Security Spending will Rise, but so will Security Breaches: Last year, we saw an unprecedented and worrisome onslaught of high-profile security breaches. Computerworld's annual Forecast survey of IT executives pegs security as the No. 1 area of spending increase in 2015, with nearly half (46%) planning to invest more in access control, intrusion prevention, and virus and malware protection. Despite the growing security spending, 2015 will also see an increase in breaches. The reason is simple: while IT security efforts will be more advanced and better funded than ever before, hackers will continue to grow in number and sophistication, and the possible means of cyber-attack will swell along with distributed networks, the cloud, and the IoT.

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About the Author

Deepak Kumar founded Adaptiva in 2004. He is responsible for Adaptiva's strategic product direction, and leads the development organization. Deepak was the lead architect of Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003, and prior to that was a program manager with the Windows NT Networking team.

He has received five patents and has written more than 50 publications, including a book on Windows programming. While at Microsoft, he also authored the Thinkweek paper for Bill Gates that became Project Greenwich, now known as Microsoft Office Communications Server / Lync.