What to Expect From IoT, Cloud, Containers, Other Tech Sectors in 2016

IT thought leaders provide insight into what 2016 holds for the Internet of things, containers, security, cloud computing and other tech areas.

The Internet of things (IoT) will fall from grace, with more haters than believers. Investors who placed large bets on some IoT-centric startups will start to kick themselves. IoT technologies that claim to enable Jetsons-like smart homes or middleware APIs that allow machines to communicate and self-direct will fail to gain, particularly in consumer markets. —Doug Dooley, venture capitalist at Venrock

Containers gained their first taste of fame in 2015, making life simpler for DevOps. But security is still an issue; in 2016, we will see more of an emphasis put on securing containers as adoption grows. They are assembled just like any other software, but if they aren’t built using clean code that is free from vulnerabilities, then it’s possible a company could deploy apps that are vulnerable in foundation. We see continued high adoption of container-based systems in 2016. —Mike Pittenger, VP of Strategy, Black Duck Software

In 2016, the curtain gets pulled back on software-designed security. Next-gen firewalls, advanced endpoint detection and threat intelligence clouds will be seen for what they are: emperors with no clothes. Software-centric tools will become so difficult to integrate and incapable of solving point solutions that they will be bypassed or rendered irrelevant. For example, how does any software solution prevent the next Heartbleed from a perfectly trusted source? Increased reliance on hundreds (to thousands) of applications will drive organization to realize that one-size-fits-all software security tools yield far too much risk, and that to protect data and software applications, they need to secure all the way down to individual applications and the hardware. —Art Gilliland, CEO, Skyport Systems

Cloud providers will address this problem by making a range of object storage ingest solutions available for various use cases. Dedicated connectivity is a good solution when the data is all in one place, and disk packs can handle large-scale migration when the process is not time-sensitive—but only accelerated file transfer technology can solve the problem of moving large data sets to the cloud from multiple ingest points around the world. SaaS solutions that provide this capability will continue to gain traction in 2016 as customers become increasingly sophisticated about upload/download options and as cloud platforms focus on presenting a complete portfolio of ingest solutions. —Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant

Businesses will demand the ability to store content where they choose, whether on-premises or in the cloud. They are concerned about cloud vendor lock-in and want to be able to easily move between cloud platforms to take advantage of storage price cuts and feature enhancements. Solutions that integrate with multiple cloud platforms and allow easy movement between them will be favored in 2016, as will solutions that support both cloud and on-premises storage. —Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant

Companies in every industry continue to turn to video for marketing, sales and training purposes. As these companies grapple with the challenge of moving large video files around the world as part of their content creation and distribution processes, they will need to adopt accelerated file transfer technology. Once used almost exclusively in professional film and television applications, the technology is now available in lightweight cloud-native SaaS offerings that will see expanded adoption in corporate video applications in 2016. —Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant

In a recent Equinix industry study, 64 percent of global IT business decision-makers admitted that cyber-security concerns could prompt them to consider rearchitecting their IT infrastructure over the next 12 months. In 2016, we’ll see more focus on reducing risks and minimizing exposure for corporate networks. Security in the cloud continues to be a growing concern for enterprises, which are realizing that their own on-ramps to cloud services, not the cloud providers themselves, are their weakest links. They also know that accessing cloud services via the public Internet exacerbates those risks. As enterprises continue to evaluate their IT infrastructure options, direct connection will continue to prove to be a more consistent and secure tool for connecting organizations to each other and to the cloud. —Brian Lillie, CIO, Equinix

Due to the large-scale breaches and vulnerabilities found in recent years, open-source and overall IT security has become a boardroom issue. C-level executives are putting this on the docket because they can’t control risk without visibility and are implementing internal policies that are difficult to enforce. CSOs in particular want more visibility and control. Without this, they recognize that they will continue to be surprised when these vulnerabilities are exploited without their knowledge. If they don’t have visibility into all of their code and have developers working with legacy infected code to build new software, they remain open to exploitation. —Mike Pittenger, VP of Strategy, Black Duck Software

Let’s use the automotive industry for example: The lines of code in an automobile are reported at around 100 million. These lines are generated from Tier 1, 2 and 3 suppliers. Like all software, this includes large portions of open source. The more software used from multiple suppliers, the more at risk you are. If you don’t know if your suppliers’ code is free from previously disclosed vulnerabilities, and it’s used in your product and a vulnerability is exploited, it becomes a major issue for your brand. The need to ensure open-source hygiene—visibility to the open source used, along with its risk profile—in all code throughout the supply chain will take on more importance in 2016. —Mike Pittenger, VP of Strategy, Black Duck Software

The connected home of today links an infinite amount of data together to make certain devices smart such as refrigerators, TVs, HVAC units and door locks. Many of these are built using open source, and security may not have been a primary priority. All of these are hooked up to your home network, but not many consumers take the necessary steps to secure their home network like a large enterprise, providing a simple attack vector for hackers seeking access to alarm systems, or cameras in smart TVs or monitoring systems. We will see an emphasis on this topic in 2016—maybe not breaches—but the recognition that IoT security needs to be stronger to prevent the unknown. —Mike Pittenger, VP of Strategy, Black Duck Software

Security and compliance (if it isn’t already) will become a key issue for IT and for the business itself. Most estimates peg the cost of security breaches at millions of dollars and loss of personal identifiable information (PII) at billions of unique records (annually). Micro-segmentation, as a way of securing the data center with fine-grained policies, as well as compliance assurance, will lead all approaches to keeping intruders at bay and minimizing damage from data center breaches. —Mahesh Kumar, Head of Marketing, Arkin Net