A mounting IT skills crisis due to big data demands, an insatiable appetite for apps in the enterprise and increasing focus on security, are among the top five IT trends that will characterize 2014, according to IT management solutions company CA Technologies.
A combination of multiple technology trends increasingly being adopted in the enterprise will precipitate an IT skills shortage throughout the next few years, according to George Watt, vice president for corporate strategy at CA Technologies.
“Cloud computing, mobility, big data, more and more companies are either rolling out or planning programs around these technology trends,” he said. “Unfortunately for many organizations change is happening pretty fast and they just don’t have the in-house talent or expertise to carry out the implementation.”
The rise of these trends has brought about tremendous disruption in the enterprise. However, in order to obtain the potential benefits of these technologies organizations need to invest in talent that possess the appropriate skills, said Watt.
Businesses have several options. They can recruit new people, train and develop in-house talent, or outsource, he said.
Widespread adoption of cloud computing, mobility and other technical advances has driven fundamental changes in how applications are created and deployed, according to the company.
Applications are no longer monolithic and hosted on a single platform. They can now be rapidly assembled from in-house and/or provider-built components which reside independently, either on-premise, in a cloud, or both.
“In such an environment, the CIOs that move up the value chain to focus more on managing apps and services will increase their company’s ability to drive business success,” said Watt.
Instead of a buy-build-manage model, IT will increasingly focus on composite business applications to achieve new levels of speed, innovation, performance and cost/risk efficiencies. To successfully make this transition, CIOs will need to increase their leverage of service-oriented style architectures through more efficient use and better control of APIs (application performance interfaces).
CA Technologies also foresees a rise in what it calls “experience-centric everything”.
There will be increased use of sensing technologies available in most modern mobile and wearable devices. “Mobile first” development will give way to “experiences first” multi-channel approaches that will leverage smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, gaming consoles, laptops, or any other platform that a consumer is likely to be using when they want a product or need a service.
There will also be increasing for “accelerated delivery” as consumers and employee demand for more engaging experiences will continue to increase at a dramatic pace as they become more comfortable with experience-driven, multi-channel applications and technologies such as sensing.
Security will remain top of mind for many enterprise organizations, said Watt.
Mobility, social, DevOps and cloud adoption have effectively opened the enterprise and invited new business risk into today’s workplace, he said.
The rapidly expanding and collaborative open enterprise diminishes IT control and requires the CIO and CSO to find the delicate balance of enabling and protecting the business.
A fundamental change and how organizations view how IT departments deliver security is occurring said Watt.
“Once people thought of the IT department as a gatekeeper, keeping the bad guys out and important data in,” he said. “Today, IT is the enabler , providing applications and services that let users do their job better and safer.”