Christo Briedenhann, Riverbed Technology Africa

Local businesses believe these will provide the biggest challenges this year

Gartner has revealed its top 2013 global technology trends to involve gamification, market consolidation, big data and bring your own device (BYOD). On a more local scale, however, experts indicate this to be a year more focused on mobile and security issues.

“The movement to mobile technology is still the single biggest global trend we are seeing in the near to short term,” explains Sven Woxholt, technical director of Softline Netcash.

“Initially, this is the movement from legacy mobile units to smartphones,” he continues. “It will allow not only business consumers to consume business-related applications, but will spread into the consumer market and allow consumers to, among other things, pay for goods and start to take advantage of cloud services. Cloud services also feature as a world IT trend that is impacting SA heavily over the next three to five years.”

Says Lee Naik, senior executive of technology consulting at Accenture: “According to Gartner, the global cloud market will be $150 billion in 2013. While other analysts differ on the size of the market, no matter who you ask, cloud is a huge trend.”

Accenture estimates the local cloud market is R1 billion in SA, but more importantly, the growth rate is expected to be a phenomenal 23% CAGR over the next five years. “At that rate, cloud will constitute more than a third of the local IT services market by 2015,” Naik points out. He believes cloud will replace traditional IT services rather than increase the average CIO’s budget such that the proportion of IT services consumed through the cloud will grow at a staggering rate.

Alain Schram, COO at Kathea, says the move to the cloud is definitely a significant trend both globally and locally. “There still remain concerns around public cloud security; however, we will see more cloud services offered via service providers in the coming year. This will drive the increase in software as a service offering. From our perspective, we are seeing a definite move towards video as a service, making video services, conferencing and collaboration increasingly available.”

Lee Naik, Accenture

He continues: “The trend into 2013 is a shift from PCs towards tablets, enabling an uptake in mobility. This forms part of the BYOD megatrend. With BYOD on the increase, presence management is becoming increasingly important across devices, allowing users to establish the availability of people across a variety of devices, making for more efficient communication.”

Christo Briedenhann" rel=tag>Christo Briedenhann, country manager of Riverbed Technology Africa, says: “There will be greater penetration of mobile devices in enterprises than fixed access devices in 2013. With the availability of 802.11n WiFi and further enhancements coming, such as 802.11ac as well as mobile networks increasingly using 4G, the typical office will be all-wireless soon. More enterprises will also inevitably need to incorporate BYOD policies into their IT planning, especially as enterprises plan and manage BYOD as it converges with virtual desktop adoption.”

According to Woxholt, social media is slowly being seen by business as a valuable marketing expense that can help create communities around brands. “Companies are starting to see the value in this, but are slow to allow the time for staff to consume these channels during office hours, as this medium can quickly eat up large amounts of productivity hours. This leads to social media being largely consumed after hours or on a device that is brought to the office.”

In his experience, he says, it is not safe for external devices to join internal company networks; however, it is easy to see the benefits for sales people to use personal equipment outside of the organisation to benefit from the mobility aspect that devices such as mobile phones and tablets provide.

According to Hedley Hurwitz, MD of Magix Security, the cloud, mobility and mobile applications will have the biggest impact in SA during 2013. “The key reason for their impact is cost and accessibility and the rapid adoption of mobile technology by the ‘man in the street’.”

However, he warns, cloud and mobility will present additional risks to an enterprise – irrespective of size. “Companies are well advised to create a security environment that protects the enterprise, but allows employees the freedom to carry out their daily duties,” he says.

Says Jan van der Merwe, MD of SecureConekt, mobile devices and cellular communications have historically had a very high adoption rate in the African continent. “It is still the predominant method used for Internet connectivity, and we do not see this trend declining anytime soon.” While the current use of these devices are still predominantly e-mail and Internet-browsing related, he says, this will certainly change as more and more software development companies are enabling their applications for mobile use. “It is also foreseen that smartphones and tablets will become more affordable as other technology providers start marketing against the more expensive brands. Internet banking and money transfer services like M-Pesa from Safaricom (Kenya/Tanzania) are already well established, and will pave the way for more mobile commerce services.”

He believes the mobile explosion is set to fundamentally change the way we do business, and how we employ technology to enable business, and since these devices all make use of wireless and mobile connections, enterprises will need to opt for smarter and more secure wireless technologies. “Central wireless management, bandwidth control and optimisation, and wireless intrusion detection are some of the key points that will need to be considered.”

He also states that BYOD is here to stay, regardless of the risk it poses, and the support problems it might create. “The key to success is a solid mobile strategy, along with effective controls and associated support structures.”

According to Martin Walshaw, F5 Senior Systems Engineer, last year there was a significant increase in security threats that were socially, politically and economically motivated. “As IT is grappling with these trends, employees are requiring access to more and more applications from just about anything with an IP and a screen. Combined with the fact that they are also dealing with key issues such as larger, more complex data centres and limited IT resources, 2013 looks to be a year of breaches, application security and even hacker defections.”

He believes 2013 will be the year of application security, where attackers will refine their focus on the application instead of just the network. “The smart ones who are going after resources such as financial assets or intellectual property already know that the application is often the easiest target to penetrate.”

Another trend prediction for 2013, he says, is hacker defection, where there will be more former malicious hackers going mainstream to join legitimate companies. “These hackers will begin to expose some of the tricks of the trade,” he says.

BIG DATA, BIG PROBLEMS

According to Briedenhann, big data is driving an analytics movement in the network. “More organisations will look for ways to consolidate as well as looking to invest in federation solutions, especially those that are cloud-based, to abstract, gather, transform and combine internal and external data from different physical locations and storage types into a consistent format.”

Van der Merwe agrees with him, stating that almost every enterprise is faced with challenges with regards to the volume, complexity and variety of its traditional data. “This forced us to change the way we think and handle our data, since traditional mechanisms are no longer effective. Companies now need to adopt ways to analyse and interrogate big data and integrate it with traditional data, which will bring very real benefi ts. By definition, big data is typically unstructured and voluminous, but can provide a much deeper understanding of customers, partners and the business itself,” he says.

“Enterprises must learn to understand how best to leverage big data soon, since the amount of data being generated shows no signs of slowing down. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will grow 44-fold between 2009 and 2020,” he concludes.