HPE sees security, devops, big data and mobile testing changes ahead
Editor’s Note: With 2016 now upon us, RCR Wireless News has gathered predictions from leading industry analysts and executives on what they expect to see in the new year.
Hackers will truly embrace the ‘Internet of Things’
We’ve been talking about the “Internet of Things” for some time, but in 2016, IoT will rapidly expand the attack surface and present a very real threat to individuals, businesses and governments. Adversaries will exploit the influx of connected devices – everything from watches to cars to critical national infrastructure – to obtain personal and sensitive information. IoT represents the next battleground as we move towards smarter environments and adversaries advance their tactics to take advantage of new vulnerabilities that arise.
As the threats evolve so do the tools – organizations will find new ways to protect their data
While organizations still spend on traditional perimeter “blocking” security technologies such as firewalls, mobile platforms have transformed the network making the new perimeter essentially in your pocket. To keep pace with the changing network, I predict 2016 will bring a shift in how organizations protect their data. New cybersecurity tools and techniques will focus on applying big data analytics and automation to the threat landscape, as well as internal users and operations. Additionally, new methods for managing user identity will cross into biometrics and across cloud platforms, and we will see the increasing adoption of advanced consumer security and identity products and services.
Devops evolving roles spurred by devops deployment
The adoption of development operations by most IT organizations will force everyone to adopt new skills – from both a technical and culture perspective. As developers become more familiar with infrastructure, and operations staff gets more familiar with code, it’s inevitable that jobs will begin to morph and evolve. In 2016 and beyond, those changes will go beyond development and operations to impact business analysts, planning teams and even C-level executives. For example, traditional system administrator roles will become less relevant as automation takes over many tasks, while “full-stack” engineers, who are familiar with the entire application technology stack, will start to become more critical. Roles will evolve as teams become more horizontally embedded around products and services, and multiple roles become part of the extended devops delivery chain.
Big data – optimization of labor
Intuition is very much a human skill. We all have hunches and “gut feelings” about what to do, what’s right and what’s wrong. But intuition without hard data to back it up seldom leads to an ideal choice. Optimization happens when data drives a decision and supplements it – at key moments – with human intuition. For example, nearly 16 million people drive vehicles commercially in the United States (taxis, buses, commercial trucking, etc.). In the past, they relied primarily on static maps, intuition and prior experience to guide their decisions about which route to take. When given telematics and route optimization data, real-time adjustment based on social media, current weather, and other data analyzed and visualized in an actionable format, people can vastly improve their driving efficiency and use their intuition to solve problems. These types of process hybrids allow both machines and humans to be their best “selves” and bring optimal value to business processes and customer experiences. This is just one of many examples where supplementing human-led processes with more data-driven decision support. In 2016, big data analytics will dramatically increase optimization of human processes.
Mobile testing
We might all have access to the same websites and applications on our phones and other devices, but the capabilities and functionality of connected devices often differs greatly as an end user. Complete mobile performance testing enables organizations to the underlying users, devices, networks and back-end dependencies that affect the resulting user experience; so they can optimize their systems and applications to perform well, prior to the end users having a poor experience. In 2016, organizations must perform complete mobile performance testing as a standard aspect of load testing, so they can remain competitive.
