What Reg readers really think will affect IT in the next three years...

Cloud, analytics, even politics

Security

But despite this increasing prominence, some respondents face challenges internally getting security to be a higher profile item, something we see reflected in many surveys:

"Increasing security threats. We currently have them low on the 'business' priority list and this needs to change.”

“Implementation of some sort of inline threat management. Being located in Asia this is vitally important.”

Another comment also points out the need for much better testing of security solutions, and the need to automate testing in many areas of IT:

“The automation of systems to respond without IT admin input utilising predefined policies will become more important. The ability to test DR and Security Incident response scenarios is something we need to do but we do not have budget available today. Hopefully new offerings will simplify these tests and make them economically sustainable.”

New tech beginning to gain ground

Beyond the now well established areas of cloud, mobility and security, a few new faces also showed up as being expected to have an important impact in the next three years. Most prominent of these is ‘big data’ and analytics:

“Complex user and business unit data analysis requirements will need much better data and process organisation”

The Internet of Things (IoT), even though it is still early days in its own hype cycle, had an honourable mention especially in respect to specific industry needs:

“IoT and M2M communications on the technical side. Growth and quality - drivers for the business”

“We’re a concert venue plus shops cafes and sports facilities and everything is becoming digitised - IoT and M2M communication”

Some infrastructure solutions were also commented on, with containerisation thought likely to have a major impact:

“Docker and containerisation built upon hybrid clouds and PaaS infrastructure”

But it is the many elements of “software defined” that are seen by several respondents as offering the greatest potential going forwards. Factors anticipated to have a positive impact on the infrastructure and IT delivery include:

“Software defined data centre/network/storage” “Software defined everything and converged systems will affect us.”

“SDN is the biggest current driver in our environment”

But not everyone thinks it is just about technology changes:

“Hybrid cloud implementation and the need for greater business insight will drive integration to the heart of the strategic discussion.”

However, for some respondents the likely track of IT developments is anything but obvious:

“I’m not sure as we are a food based company, but you never know how we’ll expand over the next few years so we may need to look at IT infrastructure more”

“I don’t know, they haven’t come up yet. My crystal ball does not function properly.” “Unknown weird changes are afoot.”

Some are positive that nothing in IT makes a difference:

“None that I can think of. If I go broke I won’t need anything, if I continue then I am well served as things are. I can’t see that any of it really goes any way to alleviating what it means to be human. The majority of stuff which is happening at the moment is technology in support of technology and is not really improving humanity.”

But whatever happens, changing IT is not going to be easy. As one respondent concluded:

“We have a lot of work to do just to catch up, but getting the investment is hard.”

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