Seven Trends IT Vendors Should Keep an Eye On in 2016

While it’s hard to know which predictions will come to fruition and which will flop in 2016, here are seven trends every vendor should watch out for this year.

Over the last few years, businesses everywhere have been migrating to the cloud. It’s been an expensive process and has lacked the certainty of return, causing some companies to hold off. But in 2016, that will change. Even now, it’s common knowledge that cloud migration helps cut costs, increases efficiency and improves computing power overall. And as the Internet landscape becomes more complicated and uncertain, even more companies will take advantage of migration services and move their assets to the cloud.

There are currently 15 major companies leading the way in providing cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), according to a 2015 Gartner report. And, as enterprises of all sizes move into the cloud, it’s likely to be a veritable gold rush, with everyone wanting to join in on the market opportunity. But as cloud migration continues, will we see a leader come through in 2016? Is Amazon Web Services already the de facto brand name for the cloud, the way Kleenex is for tissues? Or will other juggernauts like Google and Microsoft have a chance to stake their own claims?

In the last few years, we’ve seen a number of countries open up to international markets via the Internet. And the primary platform is not the desktop—it’s mobile. India, Cuba and Brazil included all access to the Internet via mobile. In 2016, the Internet will open up more markets, likely in a similar fashion. For businesses, that means honing their digital strategy to reach their customers through mobile. That also means investing in the cloud and CDN partners that can connect them to new customers. And it means looking at IPv6, which is more suited for mobile’s large number of devices than IPv4. While today customers are primarily on their mobile phones, in the coming years “mobile” will expand to include a host of IoT devices.

This will be the year that big data brings about some major changes in how companies operate. While in the past few years, data collection was important, it will be even more so this year. In 2016, companies will have enough historical data—and enough sophisticated technology to put it to use—that they’ll be able to quickly detect and resolve problems. Many of these processes may even be automated. Internet security falls within that category. Take distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, for example. Most companies have stored data showing the patterns of Internet activity that preceded various attacks. Machines will be able to alert the IT team to the anomaly so that traffic is rerouted before an attack even happens—or, at the very least, in the early stage of the attack.

DDoS attacks and other security threats will continue to be an issue in 2016 and beyond. Akamai estimated that the number of DDoS attacks increased 180 percent between Q3 2014 and Q3 2015, and the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of these attacks against the enterprise at $1.5 million. Understanding how your company monitors and responds to these attacks will be critical for business security and continuity.

In 2014, Gartner predicted that by 2020 there would be 25 billion connected devices, three for every human on the planet. Cisco went a step further, predicting that number would double. And these same analysts are predicting the market opportunity for the Internet of things will explode into the trillions in the same time period. The explosion of IoT devices will require naming, organization, monitoring and optimization, and security for tens of billions of devices. Enterprises will embrace IoT technologies in many ways this year, but it will be a growth area that dominates the next decade and beyond.

Application performance management has been a fast growing space for years, but there will be more emphasis and exposure for Internet performance and Internet performance management in 2016. More companies will look to optimize their cloud assets and move more load onto the hybrid cloud from their data centers. This move will help companies better understand their global Internet assets, control costs and increase end-user experiences.