The Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2018
The time of year when crystal balls get a viewing and many pundits put out their annual predictions for the coming year. Copying off since 2012, rather than thinking up my own, I figured I’d regurgitate what many others expect to happen.
Top 10 Cyber Security Predictions for 2018 – Infosec Institute kicks off this year’s Top 10, Top 10 list with a look back at their 2017 predictions (AI, IoT, etc.) and dives head first into 2018 noting that ransomware will be the most dangerous threat to organizations worldwide; cryptocurrency will attract fraudsters looking to mine; cloud security will (again) be a top priority; cyber insurance will explode and cyber-bullying, especially for teenagers, is at the emergency stage.
Cyber security predictions for 2018 – Information Age taps Mike McKee, CEO of insider threat management company ObserveIT, to offer his insight. Lack of security talent will lead to the outsourcing of security services. Approximately 350,000 infosec jobs are currently unfilled in the U.S. and will continue to grow. Add to that, only 11% of the world’s information security workforce are women which offers a huge opportunity according to McKee. Social engineering and human error should encourage organizations to train folks on the basics of self-preservation on the internet.
Cybersecurity trends for 2018 - For the love of ‘cyber’…or not. CSO Online reviews McAfee Inc.’s recent threats predictions report and identified five key cyber security trends to watch in 2018. There will be a machine learning arms race between attackers and defenders with IoT ransomware causing major disruptions. EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect in May, which could have some regulatory impact.
Five predictions for the hybrid cloud market in 2018 – Hyped for hybrid? Then Network World has you covered with, ‘Public cloud gets all the attention, but private and hybrid clouds are set for big growth in 2018.’ As hybrid cloud strategies get clearer, 2018 could be a huge year for adoption with containers and PaaS as hybrid cloud platforms. They also note that public cloud services come on-prem and there needs to be optimized connections from organizations to cloud providers.
Experts Reveal Predictions for Cloud Services in 2018 – eWeek queries a number of cloud experts for their predictions. Partnerships and consolidation of the cloud market is coming; they, like Network World, also see a huge increase in hybrid usage; workload portability will become critical; IoT metrics will need storage and SaaS will keep growing as organizations try to avoid large hardware investments.
IDC 2018 Predictions: If You’re Not In The Cloud, You’re Isolated From Innovation – In this interesting article, IDC also goes long term with some 2020 and 2021 predictions. For instance, by 2021, at least 50% of global GDP will be digitized, with growth driven by digitally-enhanced offerings, operations, and relationships. By 2021, spend on cloud services and cloud enabling hardware, software, and services doubles to more than $530 billion. They also touch on areas like human-digital interfaces; blockchain services and even no-code development tools. This is a good list.
Deloitte’s tech predictions for 2018: More AI, digital subscriptions, AR, and live events – VentureBeat digs into Deloitte’s predictions as part of their 17th annual Technology, Media, & Telecommunications report. Mobile predictions include interesting nuggets like a fifth of North American homes will get all of their internet data access via cellular mobile networks and adults actually worrying that they are on phones too much. We will try to limit usage. Yea-right! All while 5 million phones a day are being sold worldwide. TV viewing will continue to decline while more than a billion smartphone users will be creating augmented reality content at least once during 2018, with 300 million doing so monthly and tens of millions weekly.
10 Enterprise IoT Predictions for 2018 – With endless partnerships & collaboration tied to IoT, ‘co-everything’ will drive the co-economy with customers becoming co-innovators. With that, open standards, open architectures and interoperability will be key…with government regulation not far behind. Agriculture and healthcare will emerge as the leading adopters of IoT due to innovative use cases. IoT will shift from driving efficiencies to creating new business value. AI, fog, and blockchain will become important for broad adoption.
2018 Predictions For The Data Center Industry – Applications live in data centers and as I’ve said before, the cloud is just a data center somewhere. Mission Critical Magazine taps into some data center trends with the biggest being, ‘IT and data center managers around the globe will become the backbone for advanced cloud infrastructure tools that provide them with a high level of flexibility and visibility into their new mixed cloud environment – adding another layer of complexity to their role.’ It’s also becomes less of a ‘what if’ and more of a ‘when’ in terms of unforeseen events causing outages. With that, we’ll begin to see less of a reactive approach to one that is more proactive according to Jeff Klaus, GM Data Center Management Solutions for Intel.
Predictions As A Service – If you thought the acronym PaaS was taken, then Networking Nerd will open your eyes since he thinks the prediction business is a house of cards built on quicksand. He has his safe bet layups like - Whitebox switching will grow in revenue; Software will continue to transform networking and Cisco is going to buy companies without even stepping into 2018. And then moves on to his out-on-a-limb, far out predictions like ‘HPE will go out of business’ among others. His closing take is that he’d rather try to figure out how to use what he already has today and build that toward the future because, that’s a headline you’ll never live down.
Maybe we should heed his advice.
Are you ready for 2018?
Interested to see if any of the previous year’s prognoses came true?