Through 2016, the financial impact of cybercrime will grow 10 percent per year, due to the continuing discovery of new vulnerabilities, according to Gartner’s latest report.
“As IT delivery methods meet the demand for the use of cloud services and employee-owned devices, new software vulnerabilities will be introduced, and innovative attack paths to be developed by financially motivated attackers. The combination of new vulnerabilities and more targeted attacks will lead to continued growth in bottom-line financial impact because of successful cyber attacks,” the report said.
Gartner, Inc. has revealed its top predictions for IT organizations and users for 2012 and beyond. Analysts said that the predictions herald changes in control for IT organizations as budgets, technologies and costs become more fluid and distributed.
This year’s selection process included evaluating several criteria that define a top prediction. The issues examined included relevance, impact and audience appeal.
Gartner’s top predictions for 2012 and beyond showcase the trends and events that will change the nature of business today and in years to come. Selected from across Gartner’s research areas as the most compelling and critical predictions, the trends and topics they address underline the reduction of control that IT has over the forces that affect it.
“The continued trends toward consumerization and cloud computing highlight the movement of certain former IT responsibilities into the hands of others,” said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner fellow. “As users take more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations have watched shift over the last few years. As the world of IT moves forward, CIOs are finding that they must coordinate their activities in a much wider scope than they once controlled. While this might be a difficult prospect for IT departments, they must now adapt or be swept aside.”
Gartner analysts said that going into 2012 there is an increase in the amount of information available to organizations, but it’s a challenge for them to understand it. Given the shifts in control of systems that IT organizations are facing, the loss of ability to guarantee consistency and effectiveness of data will leave many struggling to prevent their organizations from missing key opportunities or from using questionable information for strategic decisions. No regulatory help is on the near horizon, leaving each business to decide for itself how to handle the introduction of big data.
“Any organization which wishes to accelerate in 2012 must establish in itself a significant discipline of coordinating distributed activities,” Plummer, said. “They must establish relationship management as a key skill and train their people accordingly. The reason for this is that the lack of control can only be combated through coordinative activities. The IT organization of the future must coordinate those who have the money, those who deliver the services, those who secure the data, and those consumers who demand to set their own pace for use of IT.”
By 2015, low-cost cloud services will cannibalize up to 15 percent of top outsourcing players’ revenue.
The projected $1 trillion IT services market is at the beginning of a phase of further disruption, similar to the one the low-cost airlines have brought in the transportation industry.
In 2013, the investment bubble will burst for consumer social networks and for enterprise social software companies in 2014.
Vendors in the consumer social network space are competing with each other at a rate and pace that are unusually aggressive, even in the technology market. The net result is a large crop of vendors with overlapping features competing for a finite audience. In the enterprise market, many small independent social networking vendors are struggling to reach critical mass at a time when market consolidation is starting, and mega vendors, such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google and VMware, have made substantial efforts to penetrate the enterprise social networking market. While substantial excitement will be raised by private firms going public, valuations of smaller independent vendors will diminish as recognition sets in that the opportunities for market differentiation and fast growth has eroded.
By 2016, at least 50 percent of enterprise email users will rely primarily on a browser, tablet or mobile client instead of a desktop client.
By 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smart phones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4-to-1. By 2016, 40 percent of enterprises will make proof of independent security testing a precondition for using any type of cloud service. At year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud. By 2015, 35 percent of enterprise IT expenditures for most organizations will be managed outside the IT department’s budget. By 2014, 20 percent of Asia-sourced finished goods and assemblies consumed in the US will shift to the Americas. By 2015, the prices for 80 percent of cloud services will include a global energy surcharge. Through 2015, more than 85 percent of Fortune 500 organizations will fail to effectively exploit big data for competitive advantage.