We are hoping that everyone had a wonderful holiday season which has brought upon us the brand New Year of 2019!  When that happens we all start reflecting on the past year, and what the New Year will bring.  Here is a list of predictions from many great leaders at great companies in the industry in our 2019 annual technology predictions post.

 

Converged Application and Infrastructure Performance Monitoring Will Drive Transformation

John Worthington, Director of Product Marketing, eG Innovations  “While we will continue to see rapid change in 2019, including hybrid cloud, containers and serverless computing, the primary challenge enterprises will face is still going to be largely a cultural one. The shift to emerging operating models – combined with the reality of legacy systems that continue to remain in the enterprise ecosystem – will drive the need for total performance visibility across these heterogeneous environments.

Since a digital business service is the means of delivering on the outcomes customers want to achieve, monitoring the service as a whole is paramount. This is inclusive of both the applications and their supporting ecosystems and is why converged application and infrastructure monitoring is needed today. As the customer experience continues to drive a competitive advantage, truly converged application and infrastructure performance monitoring will be a prerequisite to facilitate fast, effective root-cause analysis.

Perhaps less obvious but just as important, the organizational transparency that converged application and infrastructure performance monitoring can enable will help organizations deal with transformative change. No one segment, or component is more important than another. All are required to make certain that digital service performance stays within an acceptable range. Therefore, monitoring the service – every layer of every component – will become a necessity for IT organizations in 2019.”

 

Hybrid IT Kick’s in to High Gear

Donna Grare, EVP and Chief Technology Officer, Goliath Technologies  – “In 2019, hybrid IT environments kick into high gear with increased usage and critical workloads moving from traditional in-house platforms to the cloud which greatly increases the complexity for IT to manage.  Organizations will require additional intelligence and automation from monitoring and troubleshooting tools that function regardless of where workloads and users are located.  To successfully support their users, IT organizations need:

  • Automation of manual tasks that prevent end user experience issues from happening across multiple IT farms and locations.
  • Embedded intelligence that makes the complex task of identifying root cause simple, and deep industry knowledge accessible to everyone in dealing with errors in complex infrastructure.
  • Specific purpose-built intelligence and automation for critical industry applications, such as EHR systems in healthcare

To be successful, organizations will need to identify and avoid issues before users are impacted, rather than reacting to issues once they occur.”

 

Application Performance Monitoring Rides Again

Patrick Hubbard | Head Geek, Technical Product Marketing Principal­, Solarwinds   “While not quite the overloaded hype-machine that DevOps and “Cloud” have become, Application Performance Monitoring elicits a lot of shrugs. But tools and techniques to determine whether your users are actually happy VS only meeting SLAs will be more important than ever. IT teams are inheriting new platforms hot off developer’s workbenches, and Hybrid is accelerating with more cloud AND more on-premises investment, all while applications increasingly bolt-on APIs to become swarms of parts, flying in formation. The core tenants of APM have for years offered great best-practices that keep applications online and reliable, and in 2019 we’ll see more ops teams searching for both proven approaches and new techniques like rich transaction tracing. While APM isn’t quite as easy to implement as traditional monitoring and dashboards, we’ll see ops investing in a little more R&D, to discover it’s not as challenging as feared.”

 

Mass Data Fragmentation

Mohit Aron, Founder and CEO, Cohesity “Mass data fragmentation will be one of the biggest technology challenges facing customers in 2019. Mass data fragmentation refers to the growing proliferation of data spread across a myriad of different locations, infrastructure silos, and management systems that prevents organizations from fully utilizing its value. Unaddressed mass data fragmentation issues will lead organizations to risks such as: compliance issues, competitive disadvantages, and employee turnover.”

 

Internet of Things

Stephen Gailey, solutions architect, Exabeam   “2019 will see a continuation and probable acceleration of the Internet of Things (IoT) trend, with more devices becoming smart and getting connectivity.  This inevitably will see more hacks and more botnets of previously inert decades.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) turning on human kind is likely to be led by fridges and smart doorbells, rather than by Cyberdyne Systems’ Hunter Killers!  The challenge here is that vendors relatively new to internet-based systems have no history of having to build in security.  The UK government adding voluntary codes is unlikely to do much to improve the situation, so 2019 will certainly see an escalation in attacks.  These will start by controlling single function technology, either individually as a point of entry, or as part of huge botnets that are then used against third parties.”

 

Big Data

Scott Parker, director of product marketing, Sinequa “As big data continues to proliferate, there will be an increasing need in 2019 for technology that enables personal and contextual access. While technology continues to drive the creation of big data next year and beyond, new innovations will increasingly help people and organizations leverage big data to enable users to make better informed decisions. An area to keep an eye on next year is also the increasing focus on privacy around big data. GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act were just the beginning, and I expect to see more privacy regulation discussions next year.”

 

Cybersecurity

Setu Kulkarni, vice president of corporate strategy, WhiteHat Security  “Social contracts as we know them will change as trust and privacy between digital and physical entities will become keys to societal success: Trust and privacy are the cornerstones of security. Security does not necessarily imply obscurity and withholding – a society just won’t work in such a world. For society to work, physical entities need to trust each other and ensure privacy. You can’t go to a doctor and not tell the doctor about what is bothering you because you fear the doctor will not respect your privacy. You trust the doctor. Now phase shift to today, where a doctor is using a digital assistant to capture notes, and you are using web and mobile interfaces to interact with the doctor. Now there are digital representations of physical entities in play (digital assistants, web and mobile apps) that need to afford the same (if not higher) levels of trust and privacy to you and the doctor. Systems will need to change soon to accommodate this status change of digital entities. Digital entities will become at-par with physical entities, and as such, the social contracts as we know them will need to change to ensure the trust and privacy boundaries across humans, systems and data are upheld.”

Now it’s time to embark on the New Year!  Cheers!