Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017.  Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Yuval Scarlat, CEO & Co-Founder, Capriza

Enterprise Mobility Takes Center Stage

With mobile devices and private email servers becoming a hot topic in the recent U.S. election, Samsung's Galaxy recall issues, and the introduction of a new Google-branded phone, 2016 will go down as a year of tremendous activity around mobility. While the technology industry didn't provide as much headline fodder as certain political candidates, it did prove that major changes are afoot.

As we put 2016 in the rearview mirror, let's take a look at the trends in technology and enterprise mobility that will make the most impact in 2017.

IT leverages mobility to reassert its relevance to the business. The cloud wave made it possible for line-of-business functions to select and deploy applications with minimal IT support. In many organizations, that change left IT out of some important conversations and fed a perception that IT wasn't aligned to the business. Now IT is hungrier than ever to deliver high-business-impact wins and avoid another shadow IT epidemic. IT is going to "surf" the enterprise mobility and digital transformation waves more broadly to restore its relevance and value.

Line-of-Business IT goes from luxury to necessity. In 2017 we'll see the rise of the line-of-business IT professionals. These IT employees are typically embedded in a departmental function and are close enough to the users and the processes to find solutions through mobility, with the technical credibility to advocate and influence. Central IT will continue to play an important role around platforms and standards, but line-of-business IT will deliver more business value by becoming embedded in the departmental functions that they support.

Consolidation continues. Large infrastructure vendors like VMware and Citrix have already shown an appetite for acquisitions in enterprise mobility. Traditional application mega-vendors who are playing catch-up to the cloud wave may see mobility as a "leapfrog" opportunity to get back in front. Both groups will look to acquisitions to expand and evolve their portfolios more rapidly. Enterprise mobility is a huge overall opportunity, but it takes a lot of time and investment to build an enterprise-ready solution. 2017 will bring additional consolidation of smaller vendors trying to gain critical mass.

New security challenges emerge, and geosecurity goes mainstream. New interfaces from mobile devices and wearables will create new security challenges as hackers look for more ways to infiltrate corporate systems to steal data. Beyond that, widely-varying governmental security and privacy policies around the globe will put more attention on geosecurity, which is the concept of using geographical and time dependent information as a factor in authentication. Organizations using geosecurity will be able to restrict and manage access to corporate information when employees are in locations where cellular or Wi-Fi signals may not be secure.

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About the Author

Yuval Scarlat, CEO & Co-Founder, Capriza