2015 technology predictions vs. 2015 reality

Another year has passed, and now we’ve already come to the end of the first full week of January 2016. As we’re back into the swing of things here in the office, I thought now was a great time to review the technology predictions we made for 2015 and see how they fared.

After 20 years in IT this year it appears that I still have a relatively good handle on the market. I’m no oracle but hopefully, our clients can gain some peace of mind knowing that we are always looking forward. Not simply reacting.

Here’s how our technology predictions stacked up

What happened in 2015:

I wouldn’t have been surprised if we saw a major breach on a mobile platform but we didn’t really see that, except for a large potential around Android and security certificates. We did, however, see a real uptick in attacks and exploits against applications installed on mobile devices. This is pretty logical really – go for the open window rather than the front door. This will be an ongoing concern throughout 2016 unless perhaps you use a Blackberry device (which the outlook still isn’t looking great for I must say) or a robust MDM (mobile device management) solution, such as Airwatch or Good.

What happened in 2015:

This was pretty much a given really and although the figures aren’t out really out yet some research firms in October are stating global growth of the market at around 30% – Amazon has been reporting in figures that point toward an 80% growth on their side. As stated, the rise of smaller niche players has certainly started to make an impact across all sectors. Although many are simply spinning their marketing rather than truly engineering around particular sectors. I would expect this to change over the coming 24 months.

What happened in 2015:

Thankfully the Big Data noise dropped significantly. It was ridiculous and the market, in general, stopped labelling BI (Business Intelligence) as big data. You’ll see the second coming of BI this year en-masse as firms need greater information to make appropriate business-focused decisions.

What happened in 2015:

Hybrid cloud is pretty much the norm in all but small enterprises. We are thankfully returning to proper engineering – using the right tools (architecture) for the right jobs. In many ways, there has been a reversal. People are using the cloud for their main business operations and replicating key systems back on-site for continuity purposes. The tech is now cheap, the skills aren’t so expensive and are much more widespread – it makes sense.

What happened in 2015:

Gartner was stating back in September that they expect global security spend to rise to $75.4bn by the end of 2015. That’s a jump of 4.7% which is certainly significant. I would have expected an extra 1-2 % but it appears that the upping of prices of many security systems has led to a prioritisation of spending. Again, I expect spending to rise by a similar percentage in 2016 with all the noise around security threats ‘growth’.

What happened in 2015:

The noise around IoT has been relatively deafening throughout the year and has continued to grow. Everything is now becoming connected, from old manufacturing equipment (retrospective) through to TVs and heating in the home. We’ve seen 90% of large network operators (over 100,000 IP addresses) actively deploying or have already deployed IPv6 according to a BT survey which will aid in further growth of IoT technologies. Another key point from the same survey is that two-thirds of enterprise companies also signalled IPv6 deployment activity.

What happened in 2015:

We’ve certainly seen an uptick in the demand for improved disaster recovery and business continuity. Particularly in the finance, legal and manufacturing sectors. Regulators are driving much of this but clients expectations of their ‘suppliers’ are also higher. I’ve not seen any real demand for the ISO 22301 standard (Business Continuity) as I believe that anyone considering protecting their business from disruption understands that this falls into IT security and the ISO 27001 standard covers the whole area.

What happened in 2015:

As detailed people do generally do need more from their device than the iPad can deliver. It’s old tech and for the last seven quarters sales have declined – that’s significant. We’ve seen Microsoft Surface outsell the product, particularly online, with a 45% of online sales vs Apples 17%. Sure online sales aren’t everything but you cannot ignore those figures. Yes, Apple has launched a business-focused iPad device but once behind in the game, it’s a long hill to climb back up. The iPhone is still popular as it’s still superior to the rest of the market for the everyday user in my opinion. This gives Apple a good foothold to pull back from. Personally, I’d expect to see an uptick in the Microsoft Lumia sales in 2016 as they really start to pull the eco-system together.

Robert Rutherford – CEO of QuoStar