2019 Predictions for Cloud, IAM and Digital Intelligence

What will 2019 bring?

Although no one knows for certain, it never stops IT analysts, researchers and pundits from prognosticating about the top enterprise technology trends for the year ahead.

While not all predictions come true, they can serve as helpful signposts, pointing your business in the direction that major technologies seem to be heading. If your organization ignores the signs completely, it might just arrive at the party a little too late.

Here, Solsys takes a look at what industry insiders predict for multi-cloud, identity and access management (IAM) and digital intelligence in 2019 – and, in some cases, even a few years beyond.

Multi-Cloud

Adoption

Multi-cloud – the use of more than one cloud service, often from different vendors – will keep chugging along in the enterprise this year.

“With 79 percent of businesses already admitting to working with more than one cloud provider … multi-cloud is now widely considered to be the future of cloud computing,” Canonical’s Stephan Fabel told CBR Online.

IDC predicts that by 2024, 90 per cent of the world’s 1,000 largest public companies “will have a multi-cloud strategy that includes integrated tools across public and private clouds.”

Why? As Fabel told Information Age, multi-cloud offers flexibility, ROI, performance and (of course) a detour around vendor lock-in.

AI and Automation

As multi-cloud grows, businesses will seek apps and services to add management, monitoring, automation, analytics and intelligence to their multi-cloud operations.

IDC expects spending on managed cloud services to hit nearly $75 billion by 2022, comprising almost 25 per cent of all technology outsourcing.

Fabel says AI and automation will eventually spark the rise of ‘self-healing’ clouds and networks, which not only diagnose their own glitches, but fix them, too.

IAM

Blockchain IAM

Yes, there are already blockchain-based IAM solutions out there, but Forrester says “they are nascent and have only minimal adoption.” Over the next few years, however, Forrester predicts “blockchain will move from an experimental to a more practical IAM technology.”

Wearable IAM

Forrester warns the Internet of Things will “complicate” IAM “because [IoT] explodes the number and types of devices and amount of data” to be secured.

Forrester says this will fuel the “need to build and acquire IAM solutions that support wearable devices like smart watches as a second factor authenticator, maybe even coupled with biometric MFA (multifactor authentication) such as heart rate, gait and sensor data.”

Digital Intelligence

More Real-Time Insights

Predicting “a shift to real time analytics and supporting technologies,” IDC urges organizations to adapt event-driven IT architecture over the next few years:

“By 2021, 65 per cent of new spending in analytics will use an event-driven architecture and streaming pipelines to ingest data, process data, evaluate and score predictions, make decisions and initiate actions.”

Fighting Fraud and Fakery

Amid nasty debates over fake news, doctored videos and altered photos – especially in political circles – AI and BI will combine as a potent cyber cocktail to bust fraud and boost data security, according to the International Institute for Analytics (IIA).

“It is entirely possible that we’ll soon have a political scandal that destroys a career or campaign in which it is later proven that the damning video or audio was actually fake,” the IIA says in its 2019 predictions report. “While humans soon will not be able to tell a video is fake, an AI process might be able to…For every new innovation by fraudsters, a new innovation of defence will follow.”

There you have it. Solsys doesn’t have a crystal ball to see which of these predictions will come true. But we do have critical tools to take your organization to the next level.