CIO upfront: It's been the year of AI and machine learning - so what's in store for 2018?
- 17 December, 2017 18:31
Data will rule all
Over the last several years, Cloud 1.0 has been about compute happening in big clouds, while Cloud 2.0 - which we are experiencing today and will continue to evolve - is all about data. This includes data movement and the tools and services that support it, such as services, analytics, and machine learning systems. Every company in the world is a data company (whether they know it or not), and in 2018, the transfer and elevation of a company’s data will become its greatest asset, so long as a company knows how to use the data.
The workflow war gets supercharged—and so will M&A
The race is on to capture developers’ attention. Why? To expand the cloud ecosystem. The M&A market will catch fire with big tech companies snatching up smaller ones focused on solving infrastructure problems and building better workflow tooling. We will have a crucial role in integrating development platforms between these companies.
Open source moves up the stack
We will see the rise of more intelligent systems, eventually culminating in a series of automatically secured layers.
A decade ago, Linux was a big deal. Now it’s standard. Back in the day, companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft were forced to build their own tools because nothing else existed for them to build from. Many of these frameworks have since been open sourced. This shift is changing what companies are investing in, and making open source software the competition to traditional software.
Infrastructure will have its Ruby on Rails moment
New tools on the market will quickly accelerate ideas to production and decrease developer time spent tuning the knobs under the hood. This will free up application developers to do what they want to be doing—caring, feeding and nurturing their products.
Security permanently moves into the spotlight
Many of the world’s critical systems still aren’t hardened enough—and their surface area is only getting bigger. The steady stream of malware attacks we saw this year will only increase in frequency and as a result, we’ll start to see significantly more financial and development resources allocated for security. Security needs to be built into code development, not added in production. We’ll also see the rise of more intelligent systems, eventually culminating in a series of automatically secured layers.
Our free and open internet will be stress tested
The fragility of net neutrality and the rise of country-specific data localisation laws will undoubtedly test the resilience not only of the internet—but the fabric of global society and how businesses work together worldwide. The impact will be material no matter where things net out.
Jason Warner is senior vice president of technology at GitHub.
Send news tips and comments to divina_paredes@idg.co.nz
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