Four Technology Trends for 2011

Over the years, many products, technlogies and IT-related business trends have been hyped beyond their significance. With that in mind, here are four things to keep an eye on as we move toward 2011.We will discuss the following trends for 2011:

Virtualization

Mobile Computing

Web-based software

Enterprise 2.0

Virtualization

The network has long been king at Interop, the tech conference that will be celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2011. But networking "has fallen behind" over the past couple of yeears as a new emphasis on cloud computing and virtualization has taken hold, says Interop general manager Lenny Heymann. But now it's time to put the focus back on the network.

"In the last couple years it does seem a lot of other areas have surged ahead and networking has fallen behind," Heymann says. Networks have become more stable over the years, and innovation is heading in different directions such as cloud computing and virtualization, Heymann said. But networks, far from becoming irrelevant, have to be rock-solid to take advantage of new technologies.

"We need to look at how networks respond to some of these changes that have really swept through the market," Heymann says. "There were changes in the data center around cloud computing and virtualization that have put pressure on networks and there are some changes that need to be made."

Becuse of virtualization technologies like live migration, virtual machines can move around the data center at warp speed, but the ability to manage the network and servers "is lagging the speed at which the VMs can be moved from one machine to another," Heymann says. "Management of network has to be speedier, more efficient and automated to keep up."

And while cloud computing lets IT shops offload applications and processing power to vendor-hosted networks, customers must integrate their own networks with those hosted by the cloud vendors and make sure they can handle the new traffic originating from outside their own networks. Vendors like F5 and Riverbed have been making progress in ensuring that performance doesn't suffer when customers connect to the cloud, Heymann says.

Mobile Computing

Enterprise mobility is driven by the need for seamless access to information anytime, anywhere and from any device. However, mobility has far-reaching effects on the enterprise in areas such as security risk, use policies, manageability and governance. This three-part series on enterprise mobility trends discusses mobility drivers, risks and mobility governance issues and examines how workforce demographics can affect enterprise mobility.

One of the bigest drivers for enterprise mobility is the need for seamless access to information. Employees have grown accustomed to having ubiquitous information access in their personal lives and expect the same in their professional lives. In the past, employees would try to compartmentalize their personal and work lives in order to protect their personal time from job encroachment. Now, the opposite is true. Many employees move seamlessly between work and personal life and expect that their employers will support this new work paradigm.

Some enterprises strugle to create a business case that quantifies productivity gains and calculates a return on investment for mobility technology. This is very difficult to do, however, and most enterprises simply accept the idea that mobility results in productivity improvement. For many employees, a mobile work environment is now an expectation, analogous to the expectation that their employer will provide a local area network and Internet access. Therefore, many enterprises often deploy mobility technology without any up-front justification or global planning.

Data leakage

The most profund risk to enterprise mobility is data leakage on mobile devices. Once a user transfers sensitive data to a mobile device, that data can be compromised if the device is lost or stolen, or the data is transferred to another device. This concern is exacerbated by the fact that the design of most mobile devices is driven by the needs of consumers rather than businesses and therefore is often unsuitable for the enterprise. Lastly, the mobile device has become the new nettwork perimeter, so enterprises can no longer simply rely upon firewalls in order to lock down their sensitive information.

Some organizations have a policy that requires users to encrypt sensitive data on a laptop hard drive, but few organizations encrypt sensitive data stored on handheld devices. This means that sensitive data on a handheld is often more vulnerable to theft. In the event of a lost or stolen mobile device, many enterprises will remotely "wipe" the device, thereby removing sensitive information. Some vendors, such as Research In Motion (RIM), enable the IT manager to remotely disable the mobile device and restore it to factory defaults. Some enterprises have invested in technology to find lost or stolen laptops, such as Computrace'sLoJack for Laptops product.

Many organizations encrypt sensitive information that is transmitted between the mobile device and enterprise servers by using virtual private network (VPN) technology. This "in transit" encryption is typically performed while users communicate on the road or at home. A few organizations even enforce the use of VPNs while users communicate over the office wirreless LAN (WLAN).

Although many organizations enforce the use of two-factor authentication on laptops, handheld authentication policies lag behind laptop authentication policies. For example, many organizations require a simple four-digit personal identification number (PIN), or no password at all. If a handheld device does not have a password and is lost or stolen, any sensitive data stored on it is easily accessible. The small size of handheld devices makes it easy for them to fall out of a pocket or purse and thus to become a security risk.

Data leakage on mobile devices is a major risk for almost every enterprise. Unfortunately, handheld security policies often lag behind similar laptop security policies. This can result in security breaches and increased legal liability. Enterprises must carefully evaluate their risk tolerance and then secure sensitive information before granting mobile device access privileges to users.

Web-based Mobile Software/Applications

Of late, there has been some media hype around mobile applications. This has led to a somewhat distorted and narrow picture of mobile apps, which doesn’t help any business to make an informed choice about mobile strategy. If you believe mobile apps are the right path for your business, then you need to consider all smartphone platforms (including the 85 percent that are not Apple), if not all handsets (including the 97 percent that are not Apple). And you must consider browser-based mobile apps (Web apps) – as well as download (native) apps.

You don’t read much in the press about Web-apps today (compared to media coverage of native apps), leading mobiThinking to assume that not much is known about Web apps outside techie circles, and to the suspicion that even some of those may struggle to articulate to the marketing department exactly where mobile Web ends and Web app begins. So we aproached the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for some assistance. The W3C is the authority that’s driving the standards behind HTML5 – the new more mobile friendly version of the Web language – and all the associated standard interfaces that help, or will help, Web apps to do almost everything that gets people excited about download apps.

Whta is a mobile app?

Mobile appliactions or apps are compact software programs that perform specific tasks for the mobile user. There are two types of mobile app:

1) The native app must be installed on the device; they either arrive pre-installed on the phone – these might include address book, calendar, calculator, games, maps and Web browser – or they can be downloaded from for free or a small fee from Web sites – today these sites are called app stores. Native apps are either written specifically for a type of handset – as many iPhone applications have been – so they can take more advantage of a phone’s functions, or as Java applications – this was the norm with download apps until recently – to run on many handsets.

2) The Web app resides on server and is accessed via the Internet. It performs specified tasks – potentially all the same ones as a native application – for the mobile user, usually by downloading part of the application to the device for local processing each time it is used. The software is written as Web pages in HTML and CSS, with the interactive parts in Java. This means that the same application can be used by most devices that can surf the Web (regardless of the brand of phone).

It is much easier for the mobile user to conceptualize what this means in practice with the download app: click (pay) – download – install – click on icon – run. With the Web app it’s not so easy: you visit the mobile site and it does things for you – isn’t that just a mobile site? In the real world this shouldn’t matter, but the world has become obsessed by apps – partly due to the awesome power of the Apple marketing machine and some pretty ignorant journalism. Consumers on their PC will just play a game, music or video or update their social networking page; it might be installed locally, via disk or download or accessed via the Web, but no one considers if it is an application or not. On mobile, the same consumers want – or marketing people think consumers want, or have convinced them they want – apps. It’s all about the packaging (more on this later).

Enterprise 2.0

The way we work is changing rapidly, offering an enormous competitive advantage to those who embrace the new tools that enable contextual, agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces and networks of partners and customers.

Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.

Enterprise 2.0 Confernece takes a strategic perspective, emphasizing the bigger picture implications of the technology and the exploration of what is at stake for organizations trying to change not only tools, but also culture and process.

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