Our sales and engineering teams at PTP have been busy over the last year listening to what our customers need and working with our strategic technology partners to deliver impactful solutions. This “Top 10” list from PTP was not written by a single person, instead this blog was crowdsourced by the entire PTP organization. We requested each individual to offer their own top 2 or 3 technologies that would make the most difference in 2020, consolidated the results without sharing anyone’s answers, and tallied the results. This process avoids the groupthink phenomenon and provides the greatest amount of diversity.
Our results and projections for 2020!
1) 5G Wireless – the 5G technology will affect businesses’ decisions in how to provision and support remote sites. This new and developing mobile network technology will support speeds that are faster than many of the cheaper wired connections and businesses will start to provision their remote sites with this as their primary connectivity option. There will be great savings in terms of wiring and hardware costs.
2) Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence – An excerpt from a ZDNet article outlines the improvements made in decision making by AI versus humans in certain areas: “According to Google, the model’s results were better than radiologists from both countries. From reading scans of 3,000 women in the United States, the model produced a 5.7% reduction of false positives and a 9.4% reduction in false negatives. On 25,000 mammograms performed in the United Kingdom, the system reduced false negatives by 2.7% and false positives by 1.2%.”
3) Multi-Cloud & Inter-Cloud Networking – cloud growth continues, and use of multiple clouds in larger deployments will as well. With multi-cloud brings network challenges, and the need to address the challenges that include limitations, lack of visibility and manual processes. Multi-Cloud networking solutions are ready for prime time from vendors like Aviatrix.
4) Cloud Growth and Migrations – with cloud adoption already mainstream, Gartner expects the cloud IaaS segment to grow 24% YoY. From the Gartner article: “This growth is attributed to the demands of modern applications and workloads, which require infrastructure that traditional data centers cannot meet.”
There is much talk about cloud migration, but to truly accelerate the pace of migration the assessment and TCO/ROI analysts cost and time requirements needs to be reduced. Most business are not going to blindly move to the cloud. They need to see hard numbers and be confident that moving to the cloud is the right financial decision. Helping these business through this process in a cost effective manor is will be critical to mass adoption of cloud services.
5) SD-WAN – evolution from hardware-based vendor solutions to cloud-based offerings, all of which will allow businesses to connect people to information more efficiently and more cost effectively.
6) IoT – The growth in use-cases continues. There are cameras, thermostats, in house speaker systems, and a refrigerators that can send an alert if the door gets left open or the temperature changes. By the end of 2020 we will all be getting alerts from even more devices, all of which increases opportunities for security breaches.
7) Security in the Cloud – Anyone that is worried about the security of their data in the cloud needs to take a hard look at what they spend to protect their data in their current data center or colo facility. There are very few business that have the resources and capital to spend on security the way that the large providers do. They have the resources and talent to provide security services to their tenants that can not be matched by most commercial enterprises. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can do it better unless you think you can attract and retain the best cybersecury talent while having end endless budget for the most sophisticated tools and their 7x24x365 operation.
8) Cloud Management Consolidation – the prediction from our team of experts is that this year we will see consolidation via acquisition in the numerous cloud and hybrid-cloud management tools. Larger providers will improve their portfolio of products by purchasing point-product vendor solutions, ultimately improving the end-customer’s ability for enterprise cloud management.
9) VPN Access for Security – the increasingly-mobile workforce will rely on secure methods to access enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise. The questions that need to be answered based on the unique environment are where to do it and how.
10) Edge Computing – with a link to the developments of 5G wireless and IoT, edge computing will grow in its relevance and value. Gartner’s definition for edge computing is “a part of a distributed computing topology in which information processing is located close to the edge – where things and people produce or consume that information.”
Questions? Please reach out to the team at PTP, we are happy to discuss these technologies and other solutions that can impact your business.
Best wishes on a prosperous 2020!