Top 10 TECH Predictions For the New Year
December 16th 2011 03:22
The Symantec Newsletter: December 2011
Symantec provides the security, storage, and systems management solutions that help you secure and manage your information driven world.
Top Ten predictions for 2012
By Craig Scroggie, Vice President and Managing Director, Pacific Region, Symantec
Everyone who works in technology knows that things never stop changing. Predicting what and when things change is a tricky business. But we've chatted with some of our smartest people, recalled some of the insights we've encountered this year and come up with this list of ten technological changes we think we'll see next year.
1. NBN applications emerge
2012 will see plenty of homes and businesses connect to the National Broadband Network (NBN) and Symantec believes we'll start to see some new applications emerge to take advantage of the high-quality connections on offer. The federal government recently announced a trial of remote health monitoring for veterans, using the NBN to carry data from in-home health monitors that are hoped to reduce the cost of caring for chronically ill patients. Symantec expects to see more trials of such services, some of which will be private sector innovations unimaginable before the advent of a network like the NBN.
2. Expect more infrastructure threats
Stuxnet and Duqu demonstrate that certain entities are willing to make big investments in tools that can enact sophisticated attacks on critical infrastructure.
Symantec expects that instead of lesser attacks, there'll be more of such attacks in 2012, because our recent Symantec Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) survey showed that only 37 percent of companies were deeply engaged with their governments' CIP protection programs.
3. Organisations take mobile security more seriously than ever
Australia is adopting smartphones at an amazing speed – analyst group Telsyte expects 90 percent of all mobiles to be smartphones by 2015, when 18.5 million will be in use around Australia. Businesses have already noticed the prevalence of smartphones – and tablets – at the office for email and other tasks.
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) we spoke with are concerned about smartphones and their potential as a tool for insiders to leak data. Many are aware of research pointing to increased quantities of mobile malware. We therefore expect some tightening of regulations around smartphone use in the workplace, plus investment in processes and technologies to lessen the risk.
4. Backup gets busy
Backup has been considered a mature market for a while. However, we now see it putting up some impressive numbers because companies have recognised the opportunity to cut back on costs and a chance to improve business resilience.
The opportunity for the latter has arrived, thanks to dedicated virtualisation backup tools, deduplication and snapshot management. Together and separately, these technologies make backup more efficient and reliable. They also reduce the amount of physical storage needed to create reliable backups. That combination of greater efficiency and savings means 2012 will see some companies happily revisit their backup regimes.
5. Expect more targeted attacks
One of the scarier attacks that Symantec discovered in 2011 was codenamed "Nitro". It primarily targeted private companies involved in the research, development and manufacture of chemicals and advanced materials. A total of 29 companies in the chemical sector and another 19 in various other sectors, primarily the defense sector, were confirmed as targets. The goal of these attacks appears to have been to collect intellectual property such as design documents, formulas and manufacturing processes.
We expect more of this kind of attack in 2012, as cyber-criminals continue their pursuit of high-value targets.
6. E-health heats up
In late November 2011, some details of Australia's proposed personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) emerged. Reception was mixed, as medical professionals bemoaned the lack of complete details and privacy lobbyists continued to query whether patients can trust the many stakeholders in the healthcare industry to be the responsible guardians of their data.
2012 will, we believe, see that debate continue with plenty of emphasis on the security tools needed to deliver the benefits of e-health, while protecting privacy.
7. Information governance will become a positive buzzword
If you know what information you've got, you can put it to work. But companies that don't control and protect their data will find it coming back to bite them. To understand why, consider social media: if you know what's being said about you by the public and your people, you can control its response. Without insights into the information in social networks, you're reactive at best.
In 2012, vendors will bring together archiving, eDiscovery, encryption, backup, data loss prevention and other security technologies to give organisations better control over their information assets, no matter where they are. Those tools will allow organisations to create information governance plans that keep information under control and to save money on the infrastructure and tools that store and protect information.
8. Virtualised systems come under centralised control
Virtualisation has brought about plenty of benefits, but has also spawned dedicated management tools. Symantec expects that in 2012 CIOs will rightly insist on a single set of tools to manage physical and virtual systems.
For example, no-one can afford separate storage management and backup software for virtual and physical servers. Tools that can do both tasks are the answer to this problem.
9. SSL providers will be under severe pressure
2011 saw some prominent attacks on Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate providers.
Many website publishers and e-commerce sites rely on SSL and SSL certificates to safeguard transactions online, so those publishers can be expected to put a lot of pressure on their suppliers to tighten their SSL security.
Expect discussions on how best to evolve SSL, and how website owners can buttress their sites' security and questions about whether too many organisations are issuing SSL certificates without the sufficient security to back them up.
10. Clouds won't come in boxes
A colleague of mine has a great saying: "Cloud can't fix stupid." Cloud also can't magically arrive in a business centre and make it better.
That's because most enterprises have lots of legacy infrastructure that needs to be supported for a long time. The new stuff they buy will be more cloud-like and some of that new stuff may even arrive in integrated stacks of hardware and software. But the idea that you can just take your apps and throw them into a box marked "cloud" is simplistic. Symantec predicts there will be a lot more interest in and deployment of private cloud-style IT, but we don't believe much of it will be pre-packaged.
As the year draws to a close, we'd like to wish all our customers and partners the very best for the year ahead. We hope that by sharing our views on some of the trends we expect to see in 2012, organisations can partner with Symantec to plan and implement strategic technology initiatives such as virtualisation, mobile security, encryption, backup and recovery, archiving and cloud computing to protect and manage their information more efficiently.
We wish you a safe and happy holiday season and look forward to working with you in the New Year!
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