For organizations looking to stay on top of the latest technology trends, Gartner has released its annual list of the top 10 strategic technology trends they say organizations should keep their eye on.
“We have identified the top 10 technology trends that organizations cannot afford to ignore in their strategic planning processes,” said David Cearley, vice president & Gartner Fellow, in the company’s announcement. “This does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the trends at the same rate, but companies should look to make deliberate decisions about them during the next two years.”
A strategic technology trend is one that has the biggest potential to significantly impact individual, businesses and IT organizations over the next three years, according to Gartner. The top trends for 2015 cover the merging of real and virtual worlds, the introduction of intelligence everywhere and the technological impact of the digital business shift, according to Cearley.
Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends are:
Computing everywhere: A majority of consumers cannot live without their mobile devices, and as mobile devices continue to grow Gartner predicts organizations will need to focus on diverse context and environments, as opposed to just the device.
“Phones and wearable devices are now part of an expanded computing environment that includes such things as consumer electronics and connected screens in the workplace and public space,” said Mr. Cearley. “Increasingly, it’s the overall environment that will need to adapt to the requirements of the mobile user. This will continue to raise significant management challenges for IT organizations as they lose control of user endpoint devices. It will also require increased attention to user experience design.”
The Internet of Things: The Internet has played a big role in today’s modern world, but as the Internet of Things continues to proliferate, the Internet’s role is expanding to a diverse range of devices and communication streams. Gartner predicts it will only continue to grow.
3D Printing: While 3D printing has been around for a while, it’s finally starting to gain some real momentum. Gartner predicts the worldwide shipments of 3D printers will grow 98% in 2015, with that number doubling in 2016. According to Gartner, 3D printing is a real, viable and cost effective solution that can help organizations improve designs, streamline prototyping and short-run manufacturing.
Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics: “Every app now needs to be an analytic app,” said Cearley. “Organizations need to manage how best to filter the huge amounts of data coming from the IoT, social media and wearable devices, and then deliver exactly the right information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics will become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere.”
Context-Rich Systems: Gartner says applications that are able to understand its users, are aware of their surroundings and can respond appropriately based on the context are on the rise. Gartner predicts these apps could simplify the ever-increasingly complex computing world.
Smart Machines: According to Gartner, the smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT. Virtual personal assistants, smart advisors, advanced robots and autonomous vehicles already exist, and Gartner says as smart machines continue to evolve we can expect a new age of machine helpers.
Cloud/Client Computing: “Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal applications and external applications will be built on this new style,” said Cearley. “While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favor apps that use the intelligence and storage of the client device effectively, coordination and management will be based in the cloud.”
Software-defined applications and infrastructure: In order to keep up with changing demands of digital business, Gartner says computing needs to move away from static to dynamic models to scale systems up or down.
Web-scale IT: Gartner sees the emergence of more organizations acting, thinking and building apps and infrastructure similar to Web giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. Gartner notes that the first step toward a Web-scale IT future should be DevOps—the marriage between the development and operations teams.
Risk-based security and self-protection: Last but not least, Gartner concludes that all roads to the digital future lead through security. Once organizations realize it’s impossible to provide a 100% secured environment, they can begin to apply more sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation tools. Gartner believes every app will need to be self-aware and self-protecting.
