I’ve never been a fan of predictive articles. Mostly because I’m not actually prescient and thus like everyone else, I’ve got a 50/50 chance of being right – or wrong. And like most people, I don't like to be wrong. But this year I’ve got responses from over 3000 enterprises across the globe spanning every industry to help me figure it out. That helps, a lot.

Even without that data, a lot of predictions aren’t actually all that hard to make and get right. That’s because they’re either following a predictable technology cycle or there’s a pile of data that pretty much points to the inevitability of the prediction being true.

With that in mind, I decided to actually put down in digital ink what the data and technology cycle is showing will be pretty much a given in 2018.

  1. More cloud
    Come on, it’s been steadily growing for years. You can’t go wrong betting that cloud will continue to gain workloads. Interestingly, though, we are seeing the inevitable slide toward public (IaaS) cloud finally picking up steam. With the bulk of commodity workloads moved to SaaS and private (on-premises) cloud taking on performance and security sensitive corporate apps, enterprises are starting to eye up public (IaaS) cloud with greater enthusiasm. Digital transformation is certainly a factor, and as organizations complete their internal transformation (automation, orchestration, digital enablement for productivity purposes) you can bet they’re going to start consuming public (IaaS) cloud with greater ferocity than in the past.
  2. More security breaches
    It’s not just our own research that shows an increasing frequency of successful breaches. It’s just about everywhere. The number of breaches we saw in 2017 was incredible, and there are no signs it will slow down. The growth in bot traffic alone points to a significant army camped just outside the gates, and it would be foolish to think that there will not be an equal number or more of alarming security breaches in 2018.