Top 5 IT tech trends for 2013: Neelam Dhawan

BANGALORE, INDIA: The year 2012 witnessed how the rise of social media, demand for mobile services, consumerization of IT and shifting demographics has resulted in IT becoming an essential tool for productivity and collaboration.

The coming year is shaping as pivotal for business and government agencies as they grapple with major decisions on the direction of their technology systems. The rise of social media, demand for mobile services and increase in big data has resulted in IT becoming more than an essential tool for productivity and collaboration. IT is key to delivering new services to consumers, citizens and employees who expect everything to be mobile, connected, interactive and immediate.

Some of the IT technology trends foreseeable in the year 2013 are as follows:

1. The shift to Everything-as-a-Service: For organizations today, gaining competitive advantage requires technology be at the forefront of innovation and growth. To address this we are starting to see leading organizations leverage the cloud to deliver ‘everything-as-a-service', from computing power to business processes to personal interactions.

2. Cloud as the platform for Everything-as-a-Service: Moving forward cloud computing will shift from delivering small, consumer-focused services to sustaining secure, predictable and reliable enterprise-scale workloads. Successful organizations will embrace cloud solutions that combine private, managed and public cloud environments with traditional IT infrastructure to deliver everything-as-a-service built around customer needs.

This will enable organizations to harness the power of the cloud to deliver increased enterprise innovation, enhanced agility and improved financial management.

3. Turning big data into big value: In a world where information is everywhere, enterprises are beginning to understand that deriving actionable insights from all types of data is the key to driving success. According to recent HP research, more than 90 per cent of organizations plan to incorporate unstructured data into their enterprise insights, processes and strategy in the next three years.

However, the extreme volume, variety and velocity of information places unprecedented burdens on organizations and only 10 per cent of executives said they currently incorporate unstructured data into their enterprise insights, processes and strategy.

4. Keeping on top of security: Cloud, mobility and big data initiatives are helping organizations solve pressing challenges, while driving accelerated innovation, enhanced agility and improved financial management. However, these initiatives also can introduce big security concerns.

Enterprises must protect what matters most to their organizations by adopting intelligent security solutions that prioritize security resources to help identify threats earlier and enable a faster response time.

5. Preparing for the services-enabled economy: The rapid adoption of services delivered via the cloud, increased connectivity and proliferation of data are having fundamental impacts on the role of technology in business, government and society in general. Organizations can now have infrastructure, applications and information at their fingertips in an instant to take advantage of opportunities.

In a services-enabled information economy, enterprise and governments will have unprecedented capacity to quickly access and analyze data to deliver true value and insights.

The author is vice president and general manager, Enterprise Group and country managing director, HP India.