Introduction
First of all, best wishes to all my readers for the new year. Keep learning new things, aim to be the best you can be and find your happy place.
January seems to be the month of the predictions post. I’ve largely stayed away from these in the past, usually posting something relating to my own resolutions instead but am bucking the trend this year with a slightly tongue in cheek look at what 2018 might bring.
Predictions
- Stuff is going to get owned. Most likely some of your details. It seems that there is no end to the ignorance, or perhaps arrogance of some organisations when it comes to protecting their customer’s data. As more data gets stored, more of it gets leaked so expect 2018 to be a depressing year of getting emails from Have I Been Pwned, especially when Patrick Gray from Risky Business is on his holidays.
- SDx. It’s only a matter of time before coffee becomes software defined it seems. Whilst most of the nomenclature is industry spin, I do think that SDN will really come in to its own this year. SDWAN, a subset of SDN, has already made good progress in recent times. I expect to see an exciting level of innovation in other areas of SDN over the next 12 months
- IPv6. Prediction here is that it will continue to grow at the completely unexciting rates that it has so far
- Cryptocurrency. Have recently invested in this myself and am already seeing gains, but to be honest, I’ve not got a Scooby Doo what it’s about, but am getting up to speed. Doesn’t stop it being good fun though (disclaimer: as long as you are playing with money you can afford to lose!). I think we’re going to see a tonne of cryptocurrencies become relevant this year
- Skillset. Whilst I don’t think this prediction is going to be explosive, I do believe more traditional IT engineers are going to realise that they need to up skill in order to remain relevant over the next 5-10 years. This discussion is already at least 5 years old but I see evidence of some die hard dinosaurs starting to get it. You don’t need to be a developer. You will benefit from learning some basic coding skills/knowledge
- Hybrid cloud. Standby for an article on my take of Microsoft Azure, but I think more players will spring up this year, offering true hybrid cloud solutions
Summary
Let’s see how accurate these predictions end up being in 12 months time!
Till the next time.