2016 Top 10 Tech Trends Disrupting Small and Medium Businesses
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9. Storage – Flash SSD et al
2016 will see an extension of the storage revolution. Flash, solid state drives (SSD), thin provisioning, tiering, and virtualization are advancing at a rapid pace, as are the densities and power consumption curves.
The cost differential between enterprise flash and high performance hard disk drives (HDDs) running at 15,000 and 10,000 RPMs will be gone on a pure dollar basis per gigabyte of storage. But on a cost per IOPS basis flash drives and PCIe cards will be far more economical. 2016 will see adoption accelerate creating the opportunity for significant savings at most firms.
In fact, most data centers use quite a few high performance HDDs, of which most are short stroked. Over the next few years flash and SSDs will become dominant in this market and the high performance HDDs will become history. Look for 2016 to be a watershed year.
10. Wearables Up; IoT Everywhere
Apple proved the viability of the smartwatches this year as evidenced by sales far outpacing all of its competition and the five-percent decline in high-end Swiss watches. Though far from perfect, the Apple watch has proven that wearables are both desirable and that watch apps that provide limited lookup, notification, loyalty, and reward capabilities are desirable. Moreover, the growth in IoT devices this year will start to gain steam but parts of the ecosystem will be missing.
Vendors will build awareness and addressability into myriad devices, providing enterprises with a mountain of new data streams for mining. Cloud solutions will also arise to help corporations gather and make sense of this information; however, SMBs will not have the bandwidth or see the necessity to effectively slice-and-dice it all. IoT can be a boon to enterprises but poor planning that fails to balance enterprise-wide needs for actionability, reusability, and security will doom many initiatives and later require significant re-architecture.
The market is still immature so executives should not be concerned about making mistakes or deferring action at this stage of maturity.
Summary
2016 will likely be another challenging year for IT executives and keeping pace with technology advances will have to be part of any IT strategy if executives hope to achieve their goals for the year and keep their companies competitive.
This will require IT to understand the rate of technology change and adapt a data center transformation plan that incorporates the new technologies, including clouds, at the appropriate pace. Additionally, IT executives will need to invest annually in new technologies to help contain costs, minimize risks, and improve resource utilization.
IT executives should collaborate with business and financial executives so that IT budgets, plans and strategies dovetail with the business and remain tightly integrated throughout the year.
Related articles:
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