Future trends in Information Technology

The past decade experienced an exponential growth in network and internet bandwidth, computing power and storage capacity. The costs have come down, making these advances in technology affordable and accessible to a wider population. In a series of articles, we shall explore in detail, what this means to you and me.

There are three dimensions to all the trends presented here.

• Distributed in nature

Information and operations spread across geological boundaries and will be under the ownership and control of more than just one person. This means data management, secure communications, information security and federated identity management methods such as single sign-on technologies will become extremely important.

• Decoupled to layers

Entities and layers in IT, once deemed inseparable can now be decoupled thanks to technology. Data access and data representation are being decoupled. The same applies to infrastructure services where, the physical infrastructure is decoupled from software and services hosted. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) places a strong emphasis on decoupling service consumers from service providers. Such decoupling offers a high level of agility and flexibility to organizations.

• Analytics[1] for decision making

With the vast amount of processes, transactions and events, data could no longer be analyzed manually. Therefore, analytics will become the super-tool for agile and effective decision making.

Future Trend 1: Cloud Computing[2]

Cloud operators provide such resources as a service, where cloud service users are able to purchase such services based on compute hours, storage bytes and network bandwidth. Out of all the future IT trends, the Cloud Computing trend appears to be significant. Companies across the globe are fast adopting cloud computing.

At the beginning, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) seemed the most logical next step for virtualized data centers, for reduction of capital and operational expenditure, it has now become a commodity. Organizations will realize that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) could provide more value. The SaaS model could significantly reduce the infrastructure concerns and software migration effort, allowing organizations to get to the market quickly. 

Many organizations will replace their desktop computers with low power computers and thin-clients connected to Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI), for higher security and better standardization.  Hybrid clouds featuring public and private clouds may become popular due to the best balance of flexibility and risk management. With cloud services becoming a commodity, the service providers will be forced to differentiate themselves on quality of service, experience of staff and their skills.

Similar to any new technology, cloud computing is not without challenges, both technical and business. Federated identities are necessary to enable consistent permissions, roles and traceability across multiple service providers. It is also required to have platform level version management systems so that local patch updates on cloud servers, do not disturb cloud customers.

Other concerns for cloud service users may include; consistent policy enforcement across multiple service providers, security and governance of information and applications in third party data centers, fault-tolerance, disaster recovery and network latency. New processes and procedures will have to be introduced to track events, user activities and data paths across cloud based and in-house systems.

About the author:

Malitha Wijesundara obtained his Bachelors degree in Electronic Engineering with honours from the University of Warwick, United Kingdom and his PhD from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering of the National University of Singapore. His research interests are in peer-to-peer networks, networked computing and storage, virtualization and e-learning.  At present he is the Dean-Academic Affairs at the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology.