2013 Technology IT Predictions
By Christo Briedenhann, Country manager for Riverbed Technology
Africa
1. Virtualisation Extends to the Edge
Virtualisation of data centres has caused a ripple effect and will be increasingly
making its way to the edge of the organisation in 2013. Virtualisation technology has
enabled enterprises to create multipurpose "branch office boxes," completely
eliminating the need for conventional remote servers.
2. The Stateless Branch Becomes a Reality for More Enterprises
In parallel with consolidation within a branch, advances in technology allow
enterprises to build "stateless branch" offices. Achieving 100 percent consolidation
of edge servers, applications and data into the data centre lets IT more effectively
secure, manage and protect its resources.
3. Mobility Becomes More Pervasive
There will be greater penetration of mobile devices in enterprises than fixed access
devices in 2013. With the availability of 802.11n Wi-Fi and further enhancements
coming such as 802.11ac in 2013 as well as mobile networks increasingly using 4G,
the typical office will be all wireless
soon. More enterprises will also inevitably need to incorporate BYOD policies into its
IT planning, especially as enterprises plan and manage BYOD as it converges with
virtual desktops adoption.
4. Disaster Recovery Becomes Highly Automated
Disaster recovery will become more automated with simplification of processes and
failover in mind in 2013. More organisations are upgrading networking connections
to remote offices and adding SANs with virtual servers so they can replicate critical
data to these branch locations. Other
enterprises are choosing to move to the cloud as providers are continuing to make it
an even more affordable option. DR in the cloud is also gaining momentum as cloud
storage is being leveraged as a dedicated DR site.
5. Big Data Leads to Federation
Big data is driving an analytics movement in the network. More
Organizations will look for ways to consolidate as well as looking to invest in
federation solutions, especially those that are cloud-based, to abstract, gather,
transform and combine internal and external data from different physical locations
and storage types into a consistent format.