Strategic technologies to gain traction with IT managers

David Bicknell

about 1 year ago 0 Comments

Every year, the market research firm Gartner produces a series of what it considers will be strategic technologies for IT managers. This year, it says, the impact of the top 10 strategic technologies will not centre only on the business,  but their capabilities will also increasingly become integral to future generations of management architecture, the company suggests.

It argues that we are already seeing the adoption of 'big data' within the IT and operations management industry, with software-as-service (SaaS)  management providers now collecting and synthesising large volumes of data. Gartner also expects to see more next-generation analytics come forward to address an increasingly hybrid cloud environment, while in social media, it expects IT service desk social management tools will establish an interactive relationship with end users, enhancing end-user productivity, and providing a platform to share information and ideas, and market the value of IT to the business.

Some of the developments and ideas here may seem way ahead of IT managers' current usage, but eventually they will find their way into managers' conscience, if they are not there already. Gartner's top 10 technologies and trends that it believed would have the biggest impact for most organisations in 2012 were:

Media tablets and beyond. The media tablet market is seeing rapid device churn, which makes support and management both complex and expensive. With users broadening their use of personal devices for business applications and many organisations deploying mobile device management (MDM) to support different management styles in different ways, Gartner expects these factors to drive the adoption of tools to manage the full life cycle of mobile devices. IT leaders should develop mobility policies to mitigate the risk associated with, for example, the loss of devices and also consider a managed diversity support strategy to deliver IT support that aligns with end-user choice.

Mobile-centric applications and interfaces. Managing applications and data is more important than managing devices. One application can support multiple devices that run different operating systems (OSs). However, organisations should not assume that tools and operating systems work the same way in mobile environments as they do on the desktop. Gartner recommends that IT leaders establish a mobile competency centre to ensure there is sufficient focus on this area. In the longer term, it suggests, they will need to establish an end-user computing group with a single mission to provide a work space management service.

Contextual and social user experience. Context-aware computing uses information about an end user's or an object's environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user or object. Gartner believes that by 2015, 40 percent of the world's smartphone users will opt in to contextual service providers that track their activities. Defining and "surfacing" key metrics, such as performance and usage data, during application development will become paramount. IT operations will need to extend their capabilities beyond technologies such as configuration management databases to include individuals’ social interaction information for social graph capabilities.

The Internet of things. The Internet of things is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as sensors and intelligence are added to physical items such as consumer devices and physical assets and these objects are connected to the Internet. It will probably become impossible for organisations to develop rules and discover relationships between these devices. As a result, machine and statistical learning technologies will likely be tools increasingly used by organisations using Internet-attached sensors and instruments.

App stores and marketplaces. Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2012 mobile application downloads from app stores will top 31 billion. Business users use app stores and marketplaces from both internal and external sources, which potentially make it difficult to distinguish between consumer apps and corporate apps. IT operations will need to address overlap between movile device management (MDM) and app store management as users will use various devices for apps that will be variously in the cloud and on the premises, fixed and mobile, built and bought, and composed and atomic.

Next-generation analytics. Given the previous examples of interlocked and interrelated systems, it is important to be able to construct a dependency graph so that IT operations can understand the impact of systems experiencing high error rates or suffering total failure and take remedial action. Cloud-based technology, such as cloud management platforms, Gartner says, has the potential to provide the rapid provisioning necessary in environments where demand is causing infrastructure overload.

Big data. The rapid growth of consumer technology and steadily falling unit costs for processors, storage and communications have resulted in a major disruption to the data that is potentially available to organisations.In big data infrastructure, file systems need a layer of abstraction over them to allow for ease of scale and rapid data processing. These technologies include file systems such as GFS, HDFS and Lustre, which increasingly form the core of these new environments. Management is needed, as so-called worker nodes in file systems like HDFS can come and go, and checks need to be made to see if the rate of node failure is too high to get the necessary work done.

In-memory computing. In-memory computing is a style of computing in which the primary data store for applications (the "data store of records") is the central (or main) memory of the computing environment (on single or multiple networked computers) running these applications. As not all in-memory solutions support durability features, IT leaders need to assess the need for additional logging and/or "snapshoting" capabilities as well as non-volatile random-access memory. It is also important to conduct a design review of applications that use in-memory computing — especially database versions — to ensure the architected performance is not compromised by excessive waiting due to latches and locks.

Extreme low-energy servers. Extreme low-energy servers are systems constructed using processor types that were originally developed for extremely low-power environments. Low-energy servers can significantly reduce power (and facilities space) costs, but their increased number can pose administrative challenges in terms of scale, so IT leaders need to look to automation technology (like Opscode Chef, Puppet and CFEngine) to reduce the labour overhead. IT leaders need to ensure these investments are paying off by deploying power-monitoring and data centre infrastructure management technology to collect data on potential energy savings.

Cloud computing. Cloud compute infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — on-demand compute resources coupled with associated storage and networking capabilities — is a rapidly growing and fast-evolving market. Gartner estimates that by 2015 nearly 5 percent of all virtual machines will run on external cloud IaaS. IT operations should transform itself into a "trusted service broker" able to work with the business to identify and procure cloud computing services — private, public and hybrid — to match various business requirements.

Do you agree with Gartner's ideas in terms of strategic technologies? Or have you come across any of them and are using them within your IT environment?

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