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Cloud Computing Infuses Gartner Top Technology Trends
The list concerns the 10 most impactful shifts for companies next year.
Gartner Inc. released a list of the top 10 technology trends for 2015, and cloud computing is woven through a number of the trends, emphasizing its growing importance in all aspects of the IT industry.
Gartner published the list at its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, going on this week in Orlando. To qualify as a "trend," there had to be potential for significant impact on the organization in the next three years, according to a press release.
The most directly related trend was "Cloud/Client Computing." David Cearley, a vice president and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research, said that "Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal applications and external applications will be built on this new style … While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favor apps that use the intelligence and storage of the client device effectively, coordination and management will be based in the cloud."
More specifically, the report said that cloud trends will revolve around "synchronizing content and application state across multiple devices and addressing application portability across devices."
Another category was "Web-Scale IT." Gartner described it as a global-scale computing in which companies start to mimic the infrastructures of cloud computing giants like Amazon Web Services Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. in their own datacenters. "Web-scale IT does not happen immediately, but will evolve over time as commercial hardware platforms embrace the new models and cloud-optimized and software-defined approaches reach mainstream," the report stated.
The area of software-defined networking (SDN) is also touched by the cloud, according to Gartner. "Cloud services are software-configurable through API calls, and applications, too, increasingly have rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically," as part of the larger SDN trend.
The other trends noted in the report:
- Computing Everywhere
- The Internet of Things
- 3D Printing
- Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics
- Context-Rich Systems
- Smart Machines
- Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection
The Symposium runs through Thursday.
About the Author
Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.