At the start of each year, there’s always a long list of IT offerings vying for attention. With many solutions still looking for a problem, it pays to take a moment to consider the business impact rather than being seduced by the high-tech glitter. Here’s a quick rundown of what might affect business continuity in 2014.
The Cloud. Yes, it’s already a BC solution. The change will be in the development of specialised solution vendors targeting segments like mobile and hybrid cloud, persuading yet more organisations to move into cloud-mode operations.
BYOD and Containerisation. People now use one BYOD computing device to live two lives (at work and out of work). ‘Containerisation’ or separation of the two corresponding lots of data will increasingly be done in the mobile cloud, rather than in the device.
Big Data and Analytics. Organisations will have access to smarter ways of storing and accessing all that ‘stuff’, but effective tools for making it useful for anything, BC included, will be thin on the ground for 2014.
Security. Following the NSA snooping scandal, look for a wave of internal encryption on the customer’s site, by the customer and only by the customer, before the data is teleported into the cloud.
And here are a couple of items that remain unlikely to affect business continuity in 2014.
The Internet of Things. In a few years’ time, myriad connected devices may change the way businesses run. For now, companies still have to cope with the big data from their websites, let alone from their buildings, trucks, or coffee machines. Mainstream IoT is not for 2014.
Wearable Computing. For fashionistas perhaps, but workers already have smartphones with cameras and lots of processing power. Sorry, Google Glasses, but you’ll have to look for your ‘killer app’ outside of business continuity.