As we head into a new year, IT improvements and management should be top of mind for any business looking to amp up their customer experience, delivery, and service in 2018. Recently, at CA World ?17, I talked about how every business strategy is now an IT strategy. With that in mind, I have a few predictions for 2018 that I encourage companies to have on their to-do list as they look to find greater success in the new year.
#1 It?s All About DevSecOps
Security will remain top of mind for customers, but the software development lifecycle will now need to integrate security from start to finish in a seamless way. The need for speed and velocity with quality in development has created a ?shift-left? movement that integrates security from the start, which needs to be easy and accessible for developers as they write code.
It also needs to morph and leverage the immense amounts of data generated by a business to protect information and mitigate risks. Bringing intelligence into this process allows you to speed up delivery in the application economy, and now that companies are relying on Agile and DevOps, there is an urgent need for the adoption of Secure DevOps.
As Aruna Ravichandran recently noted, digital security has become a boardroom-level issue. As part of that, in 2018, DevSecOps will become mainstream and security technologies designed for developers will dominate the market.
The time is now, integrating security into the development cycle is imperative to staying competitive.
#2 Cloud Is Growing
Current predictions for cloud spend will be proven to be grossly underestimated. Gartner estimates that public cloud growth will be 18 percent and Wikibon is estimating that enterprise cloud spend will grow at a CAGR of 16 percent over the next 10 years (as noted here).
The reality is that we will see much larger growth as established enterprises move to a more agile infrastructure to support a nimble, software-centric services business model. It?s all about SaaS for some of the largest players, and with that will come a bigger cloud spend than we have seen in years past.
Make sure your business is ready to take on this expense, as it will be critical.
#3 Value of Private Ledger Technologies
Blockchain is a game changer, and the private ledger technology that was once primarily implemented by large financial institutions will find their value in the enterprise. From supply chains to sourcing and transactional integrity, companies of all sizes will take the same technology that supports public financial transactions and find value in using them for internal tracking and audit.
Many enterprises are currently exploring private ledger technologies (private Blockchains) to reduce time and cost and to mitigate fraud and risk. These enterprises will look to graduate from pilots into production.
After all, a business will have to apply the same rigorous around security and compliance as is required for healthcare or legal data, regardless of whether it?s stored in a blockchain ledger or in a more traditional format. And with new regulations like the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement and GDPR focusing on data privacy, organizations will seek enterprise security that can help increase their compliance posture.
The advantages of private blockchains for businesses include lower costs, faster speeds, and better efficiency. Companies should be adopting the best practices of private ledger technologies sooner rather than later to maximize profitability across the board.
2018 is the year to make your business better than ever, and by focusing on these three areas, you will be well-positioned to stay at the top of your game, while making sure that IT is a key enabler to a business strategy that will help you maintain longevity within the industry.
