Gartner recently reported on their top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015.  In aggregate, I noticed that 3 larger themes emerge that define the focus areas underpinning business technology strategy in today’s rapidly evolving online marketplace.

3 Trends to Incorporate Into a Business Technology Strategy

1. Everything is Online, all the Time

Mobile devices are proliferating.  57% of the U.S. population owns a smartphone (according to a Pew study) and Americans spend 8% of their time on their mobile devices.  Smartphone users unlock their phones on average 150 times per day, often to transact online as evidenced by projections that mCommerce will exceed $700Bn by 2017.  Mobile is more than a movement; it is truly a mind shift.

Additional form factors and devices are joining the connected universe at an incredible pace.  From glasses and watches to thermostats and smoke alarms; to appliances, assets, and even people’s bodies, the push to go online highlights a changing of the guard.  The customer is king, and the king demands that applications and experiences conform to user contexts.  Businesses are real-life incarnations of Neo in The Matrix being told to bend their business model around the spoon.

2. Analyze and Adapt: Understand Context and Security

With so many connected “things”, recognizing and responding to user context will shift from crafty to critical.  Today, a site that truly adapts the user experience to an end user’s context is novel, but with the Internet of Things (IoT) this will no longer be an optional step in delivering an online experience.   We are realizing the promise of Big Data – it’s not the data itself, stupid, it’s the answers that it provides.

For example, Enterprise IT has learned that there is no such thing as absolute security online. The recent onslaught of the Target and Home Depot data thefts and Bashpocalypse and POODLE exposures in quick succession have been persistent reminders of this truism. But it’s increasingly difficult to restrict 3rd party integrations and distributed application delivery because online businesses are completely reliant on online services.  Gartner predicts that in 2015 businesses will leverage analytics to improve online security through real-time access controls and self-protection measures.

Analytics expose the signals and repeatable patterns that IT organizations can translate into application logic.  As intelligence is embedded in applications and devices, heuristics and machine learning will ensure that the context of online activity can be interpreted, and a dynamic response applied.  This could define how content is optimized and delivered, or which security protocols are applied.  The definition of embedding intelligence is shifting from coding rules to decisions on streaming data.  Whether it’s an intelligent application or a smart machine, contextual clues derived from analytics are revolutionizing IT.

3. “Everything-as-a-Service”

Ten years ago consolidation began as a cost-saving crusade that has blazed a trail through virtualization, then cloud servers, and eventually landed on online services.  Today distributed web architectures are a commodity – virtually every online application relies upon a series of 3rd party services for social integration, tracking and analytics, real-time personalization, content localization, and more.  Businesses have embraced services out of necessity, but are realizing improvements in efficiency that have led to innovations in application development and delivery.

To serve a constantly connected ecosystem with a wide and evolving range of device profiles and usage contexts, it is critical for businesses to centralize applications.  Evolutions in application delivery that go beyond CDN are tackling global distribution and a cloud-client operating model.  To sustain the pace of online innovation, businesses must rely on elastic cloud networks that in turn employ intelligent capacity-based scalability – both vertically and horizontally – as the use case demands. Cloud-based management and automation will be critical for every online business to scale in order to serve these expanding usage models and embrace software-defined applications and services to attain Web-scale IT.

Yottaa recognizes these trends in online computing and has created a cloud automation platform to contextually optimize and secure online and mobile applications.  Contact us today to see how our centralized management service can modernize your business technology strategy today.