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 Mike. 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. CSOonline 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 so that could have some regulatory impact.
Five
predictions for the hybrid cloud market in 2018 – Hyped for Hybrid?
Then NetworkWorld 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 NetworkWorld, 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 over $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 become 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?
ps
Interested to see if any of the previous year’s prognoses came true?
This
article originally appeared on F5.com
