The "Big Five" IT trends of the next half decade: Mobile, Social, Cloud, Consumerization, and Big Data

The "Big Five" IT trends of the next half decade: Mobile, Social, Cloud, Consumerization, and Big DataJun Alarcon - 09162368200www.proactivedigitaldesign.cominfo@proactivedigitaldesign.com

1) Next-Gen Mobile - Smart Devices and Tablets

Key adoption insightA likely approach that will scale is adopt "design for loss of control." This doesn't mean letting go of essential control such as robust security enforcement, but it does mean providing a framework for users to bring their own mobile devices to work in a safe manner, including use of apps with business data under certain prescribed conditions. This unleashes choice and innovation and vitally, splits the work of adoption and rollout with users that want to use their favorite mobile devices/app to solve a business problem.Worldwide Sales of Media Tablets to End Users by OS (Thousands of Units)OS2010201120122015Android2,51211,02022,875116,444iOS14,68546,69769,025148,674MeeGo179476490197Microsoft004,34834,435QNX03,0166,27426,123WebOS02,05300Other Operating Systems235375467431Total Market17,61063,637103,479326,304261.4 % increase from 2010

487.7 % increase from 2010

1753% increase from 2010

Source: Gartner (September 2011)2) Social Media - Social Business and Enterprise 2.0

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Key adoption insightThere are a growing number ofestablished social media adoption strategies, but probably one of the most effective is to engage by example. Both leadership inside the company as well as top representatives to the outside world must engage in social channels to show how they'd like change to happen.

3) Cloud computing

Challenges to cloud computing adoptionConcerns of control.When jobs depend on IT being up and working, then you can be sure there will be reluctance to adopt the cloud. There's also little question that not going the cloud route will mean short-term job security, but at what ultimate cost? Never mind that many CIOs and heads of IT just feel they can't yet trust the cloud, despite many cloud providers being more reliable than internal infrastructure .

Challenges to cloud computing adoptionReliability and performance perceptions.Widespread outages by Amazon and Microsoft in the past has set back cloud adoption a minor amount, yet uptime is still extraordinary good by most enterprise standards. More of an issue is moving the enormous datasets that enterprises now posses into and out of the cloud quickly enough. Backhaul and other methods will need to improve substantially to address this satisfactorily for large enterprises.

Ecommerce FlowKey adoption insight

Until cloud computing workloads can beseamlessly transferred back and forth between a company's private cloud and public/hybrid cloud, adoption will be held back and favored largely for greenfield development. Technologies are now emerging to make this possible, however, and for now, companies should invest in cloud standards (to the extent they exist today) to build private clouds in order to be in position to start selectively transferring services out on a trial basis (and being able to bring them back in safely as needed.)

4) Consumerization of IT

Key adoption insightEnterprises which don't steadily consumerize their application portfolios are in for even lower levels of adoption and usage than they already have as workers continue to route around them for easier and more productive solutions. Another decentralized and scalable solution is, as with next-gen mobile, to help workers help themselves to third party apps that are deemed safe and secure.

Key Adoption Insight

5) Big data

Key adoption insight

Big data requires a mindset change as much as a technology update. This means makingopen data a priority for the enterpriseas well as an operational velocity that hasn't been a priority before. Big data enables solving new business problems in windows that weren't possible before. It also means infrastructure, ops, and development must be part of the same team and used to working together. This means organizational refinements must be made to tap into the greater potential.

The "Big Five" IT trends of the next half decade: Mobile, Social, Cloud, Consumerization, and Big DataJun Alarcon - 09162368200www.proactivedigitaldesign.cominfo@proactivedigitaldesign.com