Article Written by Eric Thomas, Director of Solutions Architecture, ExtraHop Networks
As the head of a professional
services team for an IT vendor, I spend a lot of time meeting with enterprise
IT stakeholders, from network engineers to security architects to CTOs. One of
the most interesting parts of my job is getting to talk to these folks about
their view of the IT industry - what excites them, what scares them, what makes
them raise a skeptical eyebrow. While this perspective certainly helps inform
my day-to-day job, it also gives me a good sense of what's coming. Based on
conversations I've had with customers over the past 12 months, here are a few predictions
for IT (and then some) in 2016.
The public cloud will suffer its first major breach. One of the
biggest challenges for public cloud vendors like AWS and Azure was convincing
enterprises to trust their infrastructure to a third party. The huge advantages
delivered by public cloud (think elasticity), coupled with the fact that the
cloud has been a very safe place to-date, have won over the hearts and minds of
many IT professionals. But even the biggest IaaS enthusiast must recognize that
it's not a matter of if a breach will happen, but when.
That's not to say that more
organizations shouldn't start planning for a move to the cloud. The advantages
of cloud are not going away, and will only continue to increase as things like
Big Data require better scalability. But just as the past 24 months have taught
us that no datacenter is impervious to today's sophisticated threat vectors,
it's time to acknowledge the reality that someone will eventually crack the
cloud. The time to start preparing is now.
Microservices are of the moment, but mainframes aren't going
anywhere either. Microservices are all the rage right now, and for good reason.
Grid-based microservices architectures are fast, agile, and highly scalable.
But replacing the mainframe? That's not going to happen anytime soon.
Particularly in industries like financial services, retail, and travel,
mainframes continue to be enormously foundational to the infrastructure, and a
rip-and-replace is not feasible - at least not in the near term. In 2016,
expect to see microservices continue to grow in importance, replacing mainframe
functionality where possible. But the death of the mainframe won't happen this
year.
Monitoring-aware networks come online. SDN has matured significantly over the past few years, and
among our customers and others, we're starting to see it gain real traction. The
next evolution of SDN is monitoring-aware networks. As demand for greater
visibility into these networks escalates, expect to see hardware-agnostic
vendors build commodity capture interfaces directly into device firmwares,
enabling much easier, more agile monitoring of these complex and dynamic
architectures.
The network administrator takes back control. Not so very long ago, the network administrator was the
master of IT, with a significant degree of control and influence over the IT
estate. Not so anymore. Cloud, virtualization, and software-defined networking -
not to mention all of the shadow IT happening in organizations - has wrested a
large degree of control from the network team as critical resources increasingly
reside outside their domain.
Far from becoming obsolete,
however, in 2016, the network administrator will start to take back control.
The growing sophistication of network-based analytics is giving IT the ability
to mine the network as a critical real-time source of information about not
only the IT infrastructure, but connected devices, cloud deployments, and even
the business. Expect to see network administrators leverage these analytics technologies
to reclaim a seat at the stakeholder table.
Network monitoring and security architectures converge over
east-west traffic. As many organizations have learned the hard way over the
past few years, securing the perimeter is not enough. Visibility into anomalous
activity and potential threats inside the environment - all of the East-West
traffic - is going to play a central role in security moving forward. 2016 is
going to be the year when security and network monitoring converge in a big way.
Security will no longer stand alone, but be integrated into infrastructure,
optimization, and monitoring products.
The C-suite demands real-time analytics. Whether you're a
sales leader, a CMO, or a CIO, Big Data is only valuable insofar as it positively
and productively informs decision-making. Otherwise, it's just data. While
historical data sets can provide important insights, in 2016, expect to see a
growing emphasis on real-time data analytics. This is particularly true in IT, where
the ability to identify things like potential security breaches and performance
problems in real time can have a dramatic impact across the entire business. As
IT's role continues to pervade all aspects of the enterprise, demand for
real-time stream analytics to support the troubleshooting and optimization of
those architectures is going to be significant.
Electronic health records budgets will be siphoned off for new
projects. One of the verticals with which I work most closely is
healthcare, and from an IT perspective, it's a fascinating industry for a
couple of reasons.
First, healthcare IT is immensely
complex. As the industry becomes more consolidated, this complexity is only
increasing, with the need to integrate often radically incompatible systems and
manage thousands (if not millions) of end-points across multiple facilities.
Second, healthcare tends to lag far
behind other industries when it comes to adoption and innovation of
next-generation technologies. There are valid reasons for this. Existing
complexity makes adding anything new to the mix - even something that could
eventually reduce complexity - a daunting proposition. The regulations
surrounding healthcare also impact adoption rates. In healthcare, the stakes of
deploying in a public cloud or streaming data to an analytics platform are
much, much higher.
But 2016 is poised to be the year
that healthcare IT begins to make serious strides around things like cloud,
virtualization, and Internet of Things (IoT). For one thing, many of them may
have budget to start exploring these things. As electronic health records (EHR)
deployments stabilize, it will free up budget dollars initially allocated to
those initiatives. For another, the high-upside of Big Data analytics for the
healthcare industry, in particular, is going to drive demand for more scalable,
elastic storage options like public cloud.
For many years, the pace of
innovation has created a huge amount of disruption in IT - most of it good.
While I certainly don't expect the pace of innovation to slow down (if
anything, it will continue to accelerate), 2016 may just be the year where we
see IT organizations make big strides in integrating and optimizing both old
and new tools and architectures. When it all shakes out, that alone may be the
most powerful driver of transformation of them all.
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About the Author
Eric Thomas is the
Director of Solutions Architecture for ExtraHop Networks, the global leader in
real-time stream analytics for IT and business. To connect with Eric and learn
more about ExtraHop, check
him out on LinkedIn.