As we head into the new year I always spend some time thinking about where the
IT industry is headed. 2011 was a really strong year for numerous innovations that
showed the value IT can bring to the enterprise—for example, mobile and social
network integration— just to name a few. 2012 promises to be equally strong and I
believe that these trends will be among the hot topics that we’ll see in the New Year:
1. Taking the Cloud Plunge. In 2011 companies were worried about using
the cloud, expressing concerns of security, privacy, and governance risks
of moving their data and applications outside their organizations. This
year I don’t see these fears disappearing, but I do see more companies
moving forward with cloud initiatives. This partly has to do with the current
economy. Organizations are compelled to reduce costs while improving
efficiency. Whether your company has decided to virtualize their internal
servers or outsource their complete infrastructure to the cloud, it is
important to work with a trusted partner that can be flexible enough to meet
your organization’s needs. If you have out-grown your existing hosting platform
or you are looking to migrate your servers into a secure and redundant
virtual environment, you should think about developing a custom cloud
solution. Some organizations are training their IT staffs to use public cloud
solutions and others are hiring IT managed service specialists to customize
and implement a private cloud solution that meets their specific business
needs.
2. Continued Data Growth Increase Importance of Compliance, Storage and
Security. Data Growth has been on everyone’s predictions list for years…
this is not going to change anytime soon. This year we will see continued
exponential growth even though software like deduplication and thin
provisioning will reduce storage requirements. Faced with ongoing data
growth, many IT organizations will struggle with the amount of critical
information they must store, manage, administer, and protect on a daily
basis. At the same time, customers that have been accepting of occasional
public cloud outages will increasingly evaluate SLAs, performance history,
and engage with providers that are dependable. They will also need
solutions to help increase backup reliability, decrease data protection costs
and complexities, and meet stringent compliance regulations. We live in
an ever-changing, complex world full of regulations and keeping track of all
these demanding details can be overwhelming for any business to manage.
Be sure to work with a vendor that has completed a SAS70 Type II Audit and one that
can enable organizations to achieve IT compliance whether it be HIPAA, PCI
DSS, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).
3. Importance of Business Continuity. With the recent events of devastating
and high profile disasters in 2010 and 2011, organizations require a reliable
business continuity solution. Disaster recovery and backup services will
continue to be important this year to protect critical data. Our goal is to
help customers protect their businesses by replicating an organization’s
computing infrastructure using a variety of business continuity cloud-based
service models. These services will insure that data and application services
are always available.
I look forward to seeing these and other trends unfold in the coming year but would
also welcome your thoughts on the topic. Do you agree with the above, and are
there other areas where you expect considerable growth in 2012? Please feel free to let
me know by commenting below.
– Matthew Lombardi, CEO of Atlantic Metro Communications
